Episode 03 - The Silhouettes with Afsaneh Salari
In this episode, we feature a conversation with Director / Producer Afsaneh Salari from Iran about her feature film, The Silhouettes (2020), which had its World Premiere at Visions du Réel.
The Silhouettes tells the intimate story of an Afghan refugee family living in Iran for over 35 years as their youngest son makes the difficult decision to return to Afghanistan because of the limited opportunities for immigrants in Iran.
Afsaneh has an impressive eye that is immediately visible in her framing from the film's first frame and carries through until the last. Her talents as a filmmaker also go well beyond composition. She also has strong intuition as a filmmaker and manages to artfully capture the tension in quiet, everyday moments.
In a special conversation between friends, Anna Savchenko (a filmmaker, friend, and fellow film school classmate of Afsaneh) connects with her on the eve of her film’s world premiere for a beautiful exchange reflecting on the lengthy filmmaking process that required managing multiple roles as producer, director, and cinematographer, and her decision to premiere the film online during COVID.
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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR / AFSANEH SALARI
On an afternoon in the spring of 1994, when Afsaneh was only six years old, her father asked her to bring him a pen. He then wrote: “I, Afsaneh, promise I will never marry and instead, devote my life to social change .““He then asked her to sign the paper. From that day on, the joke turned out to be a source of stress for the girl who wanted to become an artist, but later in life, she finds herself not very far from both universes.
She discovered cinema at the Art University of Tehran, where she saw in cinematic language a powerful tool to explore layers of meaning about the human condition. As a result, she was the first Iranian to win the French foreign ministry scholarship to participate in the La Femis documentary course in 2011. She then went to France to study Master of creative directing at the University of Paris 8, and in 2015, she received another master's degree in documentary directing through Docnomads joint masters.
Through her films, Afsaneh explores the human condition within the peripheries of modern societies in different meanings and forms: war, labor, immigration, and old age are topics she’s worked on so far. For the film she directs and produces, Afsaneh has so far received funds from IDFA Bertha Fund, Sundance Institute, Doha Institute, Asian Cinema Fund, and Vision Sud Est fund.
The first film she produced with an Afghan filmmaker, The Forbidden Strings | تارهای ممنوعه premiered at IDFA 2019. Afsaneh’s other passions include finding the animal equivalent of her friends and cooking different versions of lentil soup.
ABOUT THE FILM / THE SILHOUETTES
FILM WEBSITE: THE SILHOUETTES, by Afsaneh Salari
PRODUCED BY: Afsaneh Salari and Jewel Maranan
SYNOPSIS : At the height of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1982, 1.5 million Afghans took a long journey to the border of Iran to flee war. TAGHI, born after that generation, is a testament to and unwilling to inherit the limitations of his parents’ refugee status, navigates outside the protective walls of his family to trace his identity and the doors to his future in the homeland he never knew. As war continues to rage in Afghanistan, what future awaits him in which land?
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Docmaniacs | Cinema Is Incomplete
Co-production countries Iran & Philippine
GRANTS AND SUPPORT: Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, Open Society Foundations, JustFilms | Ford Foundation , Visions sud est, Asian Network of Documentary, Karlovy Vary Docs In Progress, Berlinale Talents Docstations