APFF Can Train Crisis Genre Documentary Filmmaker

TEHRAN (AIPFF) - Nader Talebzadeh, the secretary of Ammar Popular Film Festival (APFF), and Mohsen Eslamzadeh, the selected director of the festival, considered the pros and cons of making a crisis genre documentary filmmaker in the weekly television program, Haft (Seven).

TEHRAN (AIPFF) – Nader Talebzadeh, the secretary of Ammar Popular Film Festival (APFF), and Mohsen Eslamzadeh, the selected director of the festival, considered the pros and cons of making a crisis genre documentary filmmaker in the weekly television program, Haft (Seven).

Mohsen Eslamzadeh, the selected director of Ammar Popular Film Festival, having previous experience of making documentaries in the countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, said that intervention of the governing bodies would be of no use to train crisis genre documentary filmmakers. “As an alternative to it,” he added, “these courses can be taught in the form of intensive workshops in the festivals like Ammar in order for the documentarians to acquire skill in working in difficult conditions”.

“Consequently, documentarians who have thus far worked in the countries such as Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria can transfer their experience,” the director of “Alone among the Taliban” added.

Crisis documentarian Mohsen Eslamzadeh the director of “Alone among the Taliban”

Laying stress on the capabilities of Ammar Festival in training crisis documentarians, the secretary of Ammar Popular Film Festival, Nader Talebzadeh, said that the time has come to get engaged in training this field as the countries in the region have become entangled in a war that is unclear when it comes to an end.

“The US has caused a great deal of harm to Iran during these years. They have done their utmost, since the Imposed War (Iran-Iraq War), with recourse to their media, to demonize Iran and portray it as a threat to the world. They have managed to reach their goals as they have managed to impose sanctions against it and portray it as a threat while Iran had done nothing against them and the other party in the nuclear negotiations has the nuclear bombs. But it is our turn to portray our country in a positive light.

“Today the US is out of its mind due to the recent presidential election. We should, in such a situation, go there and produce documentaries about the 80 per cent of people who have lost their jobs and become unemployed during several decades,” Talebzadeh added.

Having previous experience in the Bosnian War, Nader Talebzadeh said, “In the near future, at last, we will be faced with the boiling point in the US about which we are supposed to cogitate. We should work on this crisis to produce documentaries, make films of what they have been doing so far, and catch them flat-footed by having documentarians well equipped overseas”.

Crisis documentarian and the secretary of APFF Nader Talebzadeh

Haft (Seven) is a weekly program televised on Channel 3 every Friday with the aim of going over issues apropos of Iranian cinema. It is presented by a prominent Iranian film director, Behrouz Afkhami. Ammar Popular Film Festival honored him as the Iranian Revolutionary Cinema Director a couple of months back.