TEHRAN – The 15th edition of the MOTELX - Lisbon International Horror Film Festival will screen “The Night” and “Eaten” from Iranian filmmakers.

“The Night”, a co-production between Iran and the U.S. directed by Kurosh Ahari will compete in the official section of the Portuguese festival, which will take place in Lisbon from September 7 to 13.

The film is about an exhausted couple, Babak, Neda and their baby, that decide to spend the night at the grand, but mysterious, Hotel Normandie after a night out with friends. Over the course of a seemingly endless night, mysterious disturbances ruin their night’s rest when Babak and Neda quickly realize they are trapped by a malevolent force that yearns for the dark secrets they have hidden from each other. 

As his debut film, Ahari shot “The Night” in LA and spoken in Farsi, with great affinities to Stanley Kubric’s 1980 horror film “The Shining”. 

The film stars Shahab Hosseini, the winner of the best actor award at Cannes 2016 for “The Salesman” by Asghar Farhadi.

The story of the short animated film “Eaten” is set on a mysterious, unknown planet, where a rabbit-like creature is eaten by a wolf. It meets another rabbit-like creature in the wolf’s stomach and they begin a new life with each other, but that’s not the end of the story.

Directed by Mohsen Rezapur, the film has been screened at numerous international festivals. 

It garnered the Children’s Prize at the Black Movie International Independent Film Festival in Geneva, Switzerland in March.

The movie also won an honorable mention at the 26th Golden Beggar International Film Festival in Slovakia in 2020.

Rezapur received the special jury award for “Eaten” at the 11th Tehran International Animation Festival in Tehran in 2019.

In a statement published by the organizers of the 15th edition of the MOTELX - Lisbon International Horror Film Festival, they said, “Fifteen years ago, we inaugurated a festival under the aegis of ‘each session, a festival’, to make the most of the celebration of a genre that is not very representative of Portuguese cinema.”

“After all these editions, we feel we are living in an era in which producing horror films has become a necessity to try to understand this new reality offered to us by the pandemic, wars, and climate change,” they added.

Photo: Shahab Hosseini acts in a scene from “The Night” by Iranian director Kurosh Ahari.

MMS