TEHRAN – The 12th edition of the Ammar Popular Film Festival will open on Saturday by screening “The Morning Son”, Behruz Afkhami’s biopic about Imam Khomeini. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the previous edition was organized online, but this year’s festival will take place at the Andisheh Hall of the Art Bureau in Tehran.

Established by a number of Iranian revolutionary figures, the Ammar Popular Film Festival has been named after Ammar Yasir, a close companion of Prophet Muhammad (S).

The organizers of the festival have not commented about a chronic conflict between Afkhami on one hand, and producer Mohammadreza Sharafoddin and Oruj Films, the company behind the film, on the other.
  
Afkhami’s views on some topics in the postproduction stage of “The Morning Son” brought him into conflict with the producer and the company. As a result, the film was never screened following its completion in 2011.

When “The Morning Son” was ready to premiere, Afkhami said that he no longer deemed himself the director of the film.

He made the remarks after Oruj Films and Sharafoddin did not agree to change the film’s sound effects and dubbings that had been recorded in Afkhami’s absence.

He had asked them to take his name off the titles and credits of “The Morning Son” unless the dubbings and sound effects of the film were changed based on his views.

The film covers the life story of the founder of the Islamic Republic from his childhood until the age of 70, when his struggle against the Shah was escalating.

Arman Iranpur plays the role of Imam Khomeini in childhood, which takes place in two stages. The first stage depicts Imam Khomeini’s childhood before the age of seven and the second stage shows him at the ages of seven and eight.    

Afkhami had originally planned for two different child actors to play the role in the two periods, but Iranpur gave such an effective performance in the first stage that the director thought that replacing him would spoil the next stage.

Iranpur’s brilliant acting persuaded the crew to bring production to at least a one-year halt in order to use the older Iranpur for another stage of the film.

Hadi Heidari and Abdorreza Akbari have been cast in the roles of Imam Khomeini in youth and adulthood respectively.

At the beginning of the project in 2006, Afkhami also encountered difficulties as certain people who criticized him for giving the role of Imam Khomeini’s mother to Hedyeh Tehrani, a superstar of Iranian romance movies at that time.

Photo: Abdorreza Akbari acts in a scene from “The Morning Son”.

MMS/YAW