Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has been barred from leaving the country, arrives at a village on the Iran-Turkey border to supervise a film based on a real-life couple seeking passports to Europe being shot in Turkey, but both his stay and the production run into trouble.
On May 18, 2017, the Busan International Film Festival’s Program Director Kim Jiseok died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack while on a business trip to the Cannes Film Festival. In the face of his unexpected demise, his old friends and colleagues in the film industry recall what tormented him in his last days.
Featuring seven stories from seven auteurs from around the world, the film chronicles this unprecedented moment in time, and is a true love letter to the power of cinema and its storytellers.
Secretly filmed in Iran for over two years, Nasrin is an immersive portrait of human rights activist and political prisoner Nasrin Sotoudeh and Iran’s remarkably resilient women’s rights movement. Nasrin has long fought for the rights of women, children, LGBT prisoners, religious minorities, journalists and artists, and those facing the death penalty. She was arrested in 2018 for representing women who protested Iran’s mandatory hijab law and sentenced to 38 years in prison, plus 148 lashes. Narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Olivia Colman and featuring acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, journalist Ann Curry, exiled women’s rights activist Mansoureh Shojaee, and Nasrin Sotoudeh.
Jafar Panahi sets out to find a Kurdish young woman with a golden voice that has been forbidden to sing by her family.
Jafar Panahi is a representative of Iranian “New Wave.” He is one of the leaders of contemporary Iranian cinema. Panahi’s work, from his first attempts to discuss social issues to his later and braver discussions of taboo topics in Iran are a creative reflection on the nature of cinema and human society, and are imbued with humanity. In 2010, the court in Iran sentenced Jafar Panahi to six years in prison. In addition, according to the sentence, Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years, giving interviews to local and international media outlets, and leaving Iran. Three Faces was his fourth film (after This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain, and Taxi) shot after his arrest. The director did not attend the premiere due to being banned from leaving Iran. Panahi is a student of Abbas Kiarostami, whose influence is especially clear in Three Faces, reminiscent of such acclaimed masterpieces as The Wind Will Carry Us and Taste of Cherry.