TEHRAN – Italian filmmaker Ascanio Petrini’s “Tony Driver” will be screened along with a lineup of acclaimed documentaries in the World’s Best category of Iran’s Cinéma Vérité festival.

The festival is scheduled to be organized totally online from December 15 to 22.

“Tony Driver” is about Pasquale Donatone, an Italian who left his homeland as a child and headed for the United States. He grew up in the country, married, had children and divorced. He got tangled up in some shady business and decided to move to the South, just to stay out of trouble. But he could not stay out of trouble. Drugs come into play and in order to pay off serious debts he gets involved in another lucrative yet dangerous illegal business: smuggling Mexican citizens over the American border. 

He is good at it and becomes known to his clientele as Tony Driver. One fateful day he gets caught red-handed. And it is also the very same day when he discovers that he does not hold American citizenship. Therefore, he must face a tough choice: go to prison in the U.S. for a very long time or be deported back to Italy, a country he does not know and whose language he does not speak. Exiled in Italy, he plots to make it back to the U.S. just as any other illegal immigrant.

Czech filmmaker Radovan Sibrt’s “Two Roads” and Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc’s “Acasa, My Home” are also among the documentaries selected by the organizers of Cinéma Vérité in the World’s Best section.

This year’s Cinéma Vérité was first scheduled to be held from December 8 to 15. However, it was postponed for one week due to a spike in coronavirus cases. 

Over 20 films on COVID-19 by Iranian filmmakers will also be competing in the festival as the organizers intend to attract attention to this disastrous disease by this special category.

Photo: A poster for “Tony Driver” by Italian filmmaker Ascanio Petrini.

MMS/YAW