TEHRAN – American documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee has appeared on an Iranian TV program on Friday, reviewing filmmaking in Iran.

The program named Nardeban is being broadcast from the Mostanad Channel, IRIB’s channel dedicated to screening documentary films.

The program covers issues on documentary cinema and photography in two sections for beginners and professionals.

McElwee elaborated on documentary filmmaking in the world and reviewed the situation of Iranian documentary cinema. 

A number of Iranian filmmakers and documentarians also attended the program that discussed works by McElwee.

Documentarian Mehdi Baqeri discussed documentaries by McElwee, while McElwee’s documentary “Six O’clock News” was reviewed by Omid Balaghati on the program.

McElwee has made ten feature-length documentaries as well as a number of short films. His “Sherman’s March” has won numerous awards during international events, including the Sundance Film Festival. 

“Sherman’s March” was also chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically significant American motion picture.” 

“Bright Leaves” premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight, and was nominated for best documentary by both the Director’s Guild of America and the Writer’s Guild of America. 

McElwee’s “In Paraguay” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, and he returned to Venice in 2011 to premiere “Photographic Memory”.

In 2005, complete retrospectives of McElwee’s films were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later in Paris, Brussels, Milan, Lisbon, New Zealand, Seoul, Quito, and Nyon, Switzerland.  

Four of his films were featured in a selection of Western documentaries shown for the first time in Tehran. 

In 2015, McElwee presented his films in Changchun, Guangzhou and Beijing, China.

In three of his films, “Backyard”, “Sherman’s March” and “Time Indefinite”, he experimented with a personal autobiographical approach to non-fiction filmmaking, filming as a one-person film crew and weaving into the final film a highly subjective narration along with on-camera experiences by the filmmaker.

His current work, “Six O’clock News” continues to explore ideas and issues of subjective non-fiction filmmaking. “Six O’clock News” recently was named best documentary at the Hawaii International Film Festival.

McElwee has been a visiting filmmaker at Harvard University for ten years and has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Brazilian director Petra Costa, famous for her Oscar-nominated film, “The Edge of Democracy”, appeared on Nardeban in August.

Photo: American filmmaker Ross McElwee in an undated photo.

RM/MMS/YAW