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Please note: registration does not guarantee entry if the event reach capacity. Admission is granted on a first-come, first-served basis.
Patrons who have registered will need to obtain their free tickets at the box office, where seating will be assigned. Any seats remaining 15 minutes before showtime will be released to standby patrons.
In the Shadow of the Cypress
Iran, 2023
The lasting emotional and psychological trauma of war receives sensitive treatment in Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani’s Academy Award-winning animated short. Without spoken dialogue, Molayemi and Sohani’s elegant 2D animation expresses the fullness of love, regret and hope shared between a father and daughter who find themselves at a turning point between the pain of the past and the possibility of healing as they struggle to rescue a whale that beaches itself in front of their coastal home.
DCP, color, 20 min. Directors: Hossein Molayemi, Shirin Sohani. Screenwriters: Hossein Molayemi, Shirin Sohani.
The Siren
France/Germany/Luxembourg/Belgium, 2023
For 14-year-old Omid, the Iran-Iraq War begins with rockets tearing over a soccer game he’s playing with his friends in the Iranian port of Abadan. After Omid refuses to evacuate with his mother, he takes over an injured friend’s food delivery route that brings him into contact with a disparate group of eccentrics struggling to survive the chaos. With the city soon poised to fall, they band together to devise a daring escape plan. In deploying a 2D animation style to tell this story of war, director Sepideh Farsi (Red Rose, 2015 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema) confronts its horrors head on while illuminating in fresh and visually compelling ways the humanity besieged by it.
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 100 min. Director: Sepideh Farsi. Screenwriter: Javad Djavahery. With: Mina Kavani, Hamidreza Djavdan, Parviz Sayyad.
