TEHRAN – Iranian movies “Killing the Eunuch Khan” and “The Fourth Wall” will be competing in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia.

“Killing the Eunuch Khan” directed by Abed Abest will be screened in the official competition of the festival, which will be held in the Estonian capital from November 12 to 18.

In this film, during the war between Iran and Iraq, a father lives with her two daughters in a big, strangely haunted house in an almost deserted city near the border. 

One day, he leaves the girls at home alone in order to participate in a funeral ceremony. That same day, the city is struck by a bombing raid, and a bomb falls in his garden. From that point on, some sort of ghostly vibration unhinges his own reality, and the world of the dead seems to mingle with the world of living.

“‘Killing the Eunuch Khan’ is a masterful work of a young director obsessed with the thin line that separates the time of the physical reality and the otherworldly realm,” Italian screenwriter Dario Vecchiato has said on the website of the Tallinn festival.  

“You’ll discover a new, powerful voice in the already exciting and crowded landscape of contemporary Middle Eastern cinema,” he added.

“Abest’s vision is strikingly beautiful and deeply disturbing. You’ll be led through a delicate nightmare; its ambition is to represent the feelings and sensations of a people who are weary of endless fights and the inevitable horizons of destruction,” Vecchiato noted.

The acclaimed animated short film “The Fourth Wall” will be competing in the short section of the festival.

In “The Fourth Wall” directed by Mahbubeh Kalai, home and family, relationships, desires, wishes and everything are summarized in a kitchen, where a stuttering boy is alone there, playing with his imagination.

The movie has been screened in many international festivals and has won several honors, including the Zlatko Grgic Award at the 31st Animafest Zagreb in Croatia in June.

Photo: “Killing the Eunuch Khan” by Abed Abest.

MMS/YAW