TEHRAN-“The Golden Thread” by Indian filmmaker Nishtha Jain won the main award of the full-length documentaries category in the international competition section of the 17th International Documentary Film Festival of Iran, known as Cinéma Vérité, at the closing ceremony on Saturday night.

The 82-minute film is a collaborative production of India, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK, Mehr reported.

It depicts a region outside Kolkata where a few jute mills crank on, virtually unchanged since the Industrial Revolution. Powered by steam and sweat, work is a dance to the rhythms of the century-old machines. “The Golden Thread” follows the weft and warp of jute work, weaving the 'fiber of the future' with the dreams and desperations of its workers.

In the mid-length documentary category of the international competition section, the Lebanese documentary “Kalashnikov Society” by Christophe Karabache won the main award.

Captured between August 2020 and 2021, the film shows Beirut, right after the August 4th explosion. It follows trails of life, torn out of a burdensome and peculiar daily existence, interweaving melancholia, wanderings, endurance, and anger, of several people, living in a country on the edge of the abyss.

The special jury prize of the section was awarded to “Under Construction” from Finland, directed by Markus Toivo.

The 61-minute documentary shows an estranged father and son who are building a gate in front of their unfinished house while also trying to bridge the generational gap between them.

The short documentary “Vibrations from Gaza” by the Palestinian-Canadian filmmaker Rehab Nazzal was announced as the winner of the short documentary category of the international competition section

It offers a glimpse into the experiences of deaf children in the colonized and confined coastal territory of Gaza, Palestine, and how they survive Israel’s frequent military attacks.

Among the several winners of various categories of the national section, the feature-length “Born in Captivity” by Mehdi Imani-Shahmiri won the main award.

The 68-minute movie is centered around Persian cheetahs. With the subspecies in danger, the Iranian Department of Environment decides to kick off a captive breeding program.

The award for the best director of a feature-length film went to Maryam Elhamian and Mostafa Hajighasemi for their film “Khalaj Family”.

It is about the Khalaj Family that sells all its possessions in hopes of setting up a production workshop and moving to a desert region in Isfahan Province. Grappling with the consequences of this decision, Mrs. Khalaj tries to extricate her family from family trouble.

Also at the closing ceremony, the director of the Kazan International Muslim Film Festival Milyausha Aituganova, who served as a jury member for the feature-length documentary category of the international section, was honored for paying attention to Islam and Iranian cinema in the festival she runs in Kazan, Russia.

The 17th Cinéma Vérité was organized by the Documentary & Experimental Film Center (DEFC). It aims to represent the history and culture of Iranian Islamic society and present a real picture of what humans are facing today in his/her individual and social life through documentary films.

With this objective, the special focus of this edition of the festival was on two national and international challenges: the water crisis and population issues.

A total of 2,454 documentaries from around the world were submitted to the event including 615 works from Iran and 1,839 foreign documentaries from Turkey, China, the UK, Russia, Poland, Spain, Egypt, Argentina, Indonesia, and Germany among others.

Photo: Russian independent filmmaker and festival director Milyausha Aituganova (L) was honored at the closing ceremony of the 17th Cinema Verite in Tehran, on December 23, 2023.

SS/SAB