TEHRAN – The 12th edition of the Tehran International Animation Festival, scheduled to be held in March, was postponed for three months as the Iranian capital battles to control an accelerating surge in Omicron infections.

“Due to a decrease in COVID-19 infections in the country, we hoped to organize the festival from March 6 to 10… however, the spread of the virus brought the event to a halt,” the secretary of the festival, Mohammadreza Karimi-Saremi, said in a press release on Monday.

He noted that the decision to postpone the festival was made in order to respect the festival’s guests and health workers on the frontline of the country’s fight against the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus.  

Accordingly, the festival will be held from May 29 to June 2.

Due to the pandemic, the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA - Kanoon), which is the main organizer of the festival, canceled the event in 2021.

Over 180 movies from overseas filmmakers along with 36 Iranian movies will be competing in the festival as the organizers announced the official lineup in January.

The animations come from South Korea, Chile, Poland, the Netherlands, Czech, Japan, China, France, Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Brazil and dozens of other countries.

“Lajka” by Czech director Aurel Klimt and “The Nose or Conspiracy of Mavericks” by Russian director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy are the sole two feature animations in the international competition. 

Klimt’s movie shows that life is not easy for Laika, a dog on the outskirts of a big Russian city. She is caught and forcibly retrained to become a pioneer in astronautics. Soon after her lift-off into space, a number of animals follow that are hurriedly launched from Houston and Baikonur. The animals manage to colonize a faraway planet. After a short period of harmonious, undisturbed co-existence with indigenous life forms, the first human cosmonaut comes ashore on their planet, and they are suddenly in jeopardy.

“The Nose or Conspiracy of Mavericks” is a cheerfully grim look at the follies of the twentieth century, anchored in Gogol’s proto-surrealist novella, “The Nose”, and Shostakovich’s opera of the same name.

Photo: A poster for the 12th Tehran International Animation Festival.

MMS/YAW