Cinema Vérité to pay tribute to Khosro Sinai
TEHRAN –(Iranart)- The Documentary and Experimental Film Center (DEFC) plans to pay tribute to the celebrated filmmaker Khosro Sinai, a COVID-19 victim, during the 14th edition of the Cinema Vérité, Iran’s major international festival for documentary films.
Mohammad Hamidi-Moqaddam, the director of the DEFC that is the main organizer of the festival, announced the plan on Sunday during a visit to Sinai’s family at his home.
He also said that the DEFC plans to publish writer Masumeh Kiani’s book containing extensive interviews with Sinai and veteran filmmakers Mohammadreza Aslani and Manuchehr Tayyab.
The center organizes the Cinema Vérité in Tehran every year during December. This year the event will likely be held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Mr. Sinai belonged to a certain period, during which masters Aslani, [Kamran] Shirdel and Tayyab worked as the treasures of our documentary cinema,” Hamidi-Moqaddam said during the meeting, which was attended by Sinai’s widows Farah Osuli and Gizella Varga Sinai and Aslani.
The 79-year-old Sinai, director of acclaimed Iranian drama “Bride of Fire” and several documentary films, died of COVID-19 on August 1.
“The center is our home,” Aslani said and added, “Khosro and Tayyab also believed so. It has made useful contact with filmmakers and they have made good films. It is really significant that the filmmakers are freely are working in this center, while other centers do not carry out their duties so well.”
Filmmaker Orod Atapur, who was a Sinai’s student at Tehran’s Bagh Ferdows Film Center, also attended the meeting.
“I was a student of master Sinai since 1983 and I feel proud of this. All students loved him and owe him. He taught us life’s lessons,” said Atapur, director of the acclaimed documentary “Persepolis-Chicago”, which is about Iran’s Achaemenid tablets, which were loaned to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 1937 for study.
“Talking with a Shadow” about Iran’s foremost short story writer, Sadeq Hedayat, was one of Sinai’s outstanding works.
Among his credits are also “The Melody Which an Antique Hears”, “Beyond the Clamor”, “The Coldness of Iron”, “Haj Mosavvar al-Maleki” and “Hossein Yavari”.
Sinai was also the director of “The Lost Requiem”, for which he received Poland’s Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit decoration in 2008.
The documentary recounts the story of the wartime exodus to Iran of thousands of Polish citizens after being released from the Soviet labor camps of Siberia during World War II.
source: Tehran Times