TEHRAN – The Iranian movies “Mom”, “Absence” and “Lipar” have garnered awards at the 10th edition of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona in Spain.

“Mom”, also known as “Maman”, brought the award for best director for Arash Anisi in the official section during the closing ceremony of the festival last week.

The acclaimed drama portrays a woman, who lost all the nice things she once had, including her name, her job and her husband, years ago after the outbreak of the war. Now she works as a taxi driver and lives with her three children in a small apartment. In order to proceed with her maternal authority, she decides to keep her children away from each other, and of course from a plot of land that she owns. Just when she gets rid of the wife of her youngest son, her other son decides to marry one of her companions. The story thus unfolds in two parallel worlds: in the real world and in the world recreated in the film script that her youngest son is writing.

Earlier last week, the film’s stars Roya Afshar and Erfan Ebrahimi won the awards for best actor and supporting actor at the Les Rimbaud du Cinema festival in France.

In the Asian Film Festival Barcelona panorama section, “Absence” won the best screenplay award.

Written and directed by Ali Mosaffa, the film is about Ruzebeh, who travels from Tehran, far from his troubled family life, to Prague, Czech Republic, immersing himself in an investigation that follows his father’s path as a communist expatriate in Czechoslovakia, in his quest to understand better his father, who started a new life in Eastern Europe after the 1953 coup. Yet each clue he finds deepens the mystery surrounding the man he thought he knew.

“Lipar” by Hossein Rigi received the award for best screenplay.

It follows Barakat, a Baloch teen, who is very interested in the cinema industry, especially Bollywood. He is trying to find his life’s vague secret to find an answer to his questions.

In the official competition, the Chinese drama “Return to Dust” by Li Ruijun was selected as best film, while “When Pomegranates Howl”, a co-production between Afghanistan and Australia by Granaz Musavi, won the best screenplay award.

Photo: Roya Afshar acts in a scene from “Mom” by Arash Anisi.

MMS/YAW