TEHRAN – Four Iranian movies will be competing in the 41st Vancouver International Film Festival, which will take place in the Canadian city from September 29 to October 9.

“No Prior Appointment” by Behruz Shoeibi, “Like a Fish on the Moon” by Dornaz Hajiha, “The Locust” by Faezeh Azizkhani and “See You Friday, Robinson” by Mitra Farahani have been selected to be screened in different categories of the festival.

“No Prior Appointment” and “Like a Fish on the Moon” will be shown in the Panorama section.

The acclaimed drama “No Prior Appointment” tells the story of an Iranian emigrant who, after 30 years, is compelled to return to her home country upon learning of her estranged father’s death. She hastily takes leave from her work as a doctor in Germany, bringing her young autistic son with her. 

Shoeibi explores the ideas of return, leftover threads of memory of a land, and the sense of self that was once left behind. With nuanced grace, the film explores the longing for homeland, the questions of belonging, and the strange sense of homecoming upon returning to the country of your childhood.

In “Like a Fish on the Moon”, Haleh and her husband Amir have to cope with a tough situation: their four-year-old son Ilya has suddenly stopped talking. There is evidently no physiological cause, so they go to see a psychotherapist who comes up with a radical solution. Ilya’s mother, who has cared for him until now, is to take a back seat while the father assumes her role in looking after the child. This change in the established order sends the family into a downward spiral of tension and aggression, and it’s extremely difficult to see a way out.

The comedy-drama “The Locust” is about Hanieh, who abandons the hope of directing her semi-autobiographical screenplay and sells it to her well-connected best friend to direct instead. The latter keeps Hanieh around to advise in script meetings and cast rehearsals, but as the production wears on, it becomes painfully clear that neither the new director nor her highly critical crew have any respect for our protagonist’s original vision.

As a co-production from France, Switzerland, Iran and Lebanon, the documentary “See You Friday, Robinson” provides an affectionate depiction of an encounter between the breathless titans, Jean-Luc Godard and Iranian filmmaker and literary figure Ebrahim Golestan. They engage in long-distance exchanges of quotations and cryptic statements. Their dialogue, which should have taken place long ago in the last century, inevitably consists of weighty themes, such as humanity, time, art and death.  

Photo: Pegah Ahangarani and Mostafa Zamani act in a scene from “No Prior Appointment”.

MMS/YAW