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Ava braves hurdles to reach International Film Festival of Kerala

Ava will be screened at the 22nd International Film Festival of Kerala.

Thiruvananthapuram: The restrictions she depicts in her movie, coming to a young girl growing up in Iran, appear to have come to her work too. Sadaf Foroughi’s first draft of her debut film Ava was rejected by Iranian censors. Filmmakers must submit their scripts before shooting in the country, and apparently, they didn’t want a woman making a film about women. So Sadaf rewrote her script to put a man in place of Ava as the protagonist and submitted it again. They approved, and she went back to her original script to shoot the story of Ava, a girl coming of age, and rebelling against the rules forced on her, when she realises her parents were once rule-breakers. Ava will be screened at the 22nd International Film Festival of Kerala.

Sadaf who grew up in Tehran till she was 20 has taken bits from her life to tell the story that she calls personal. At 20, she moved to France, where she studied film and got a PhD before moving to Montreal. Sadaf also had trouble before the premiere of Ava at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her two young actresses were denied entry to Canada by the Canadian embassy. Mahouri Jabbari, 17, and Shayesteh Sahadi, 18, received letters from the embassy, doubting their motives for attending the festival though they had letters from TIFF to offer in proof.

Pornochanchadas

Brazil in the 1970s, under a military dictatorship that would last 21 years. It is in those years that there came a genre of cinema called the pornochanchadas - films combining comedy and soft-core pornography. It had a lot of appeal back then. In 2017, a young filmmaker called Fernanda Pessoa goes back to these dark times, and takes a film using snippets from these pornochanchadas - a mash-up os images and sounds from a selection of movies. That is what Fernando's film Stories Our Cinema Did (Not) Tell (Histórias que nosso cinema (não) contava) is and it will be screened in the Country in Focus (Brazil) category of the IFFK.

Ockhi: IFFK cancels inaugural ceremony
In solidarity with the victims of the Ockhi tragedy, the Chalachithra Academy is cancelling the official inaugural ceremony and cultural programmes planned for the 22nd International Film Festival of Kerala that begins on December 8. Film screenings will be held as scheduled. The opening film The Insult will be screened on the evening of December 8.

( Source : Deccan Chronicle. )
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