TEHRAN -- A festival of movies from European filmmakers will open in Tehran on November 7, the organizers have announced.

The festival titled “European Film Week” will screen movies from 14 countries including Italy, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece and Austria. 

The festival, which was held in various cities of Iran for the past three years, will go online this year in Tehran, and the movies will be available on Hashure, an Iranian platform providing video on demand (VOD) service for documentary films.

The program has been organized as a collaborative effort between Iran’s Art and Experience Cinema and the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC).

The two institutions have previously organized the festival in Iran in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

The 2019 edition of the festival opened in the Iranian Artists Forum in Tehran.

President of EUNIC European Union National Institutes for Culture in Iran Alexander Rieger made the opening speech and called the event a great European cultural project.

He added that the number of participating countries has increased compared to previous editions indicating the fact that the European countries pay considerable attention to increasing cultural relations with Iran.

Rieger, who is also the director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tehran, added that there needs to be more efforts to make cultural bridges with Iran since cultural exchange can help us understand each other more deeply.

The Dutch Ambassador to Iran, Jacques Werner, in his brief remarks said that a variety of films were selected to be screened at the festival, each bearing a significant message. 

He added that all the European embassies in Iran want to share these stories with Iranians, and nothing can act better than cultural exchange.

He hoped that the films would be interesting for the viewers.

The program opened with “The Dark Valley”, a 2014 Austrian-German western drama directed by Andreas Prochaska, and “The Silent Army”, Dutch director Jean van de Velde’s 2008 drama about the hardships of child soldiers in Africa.

Ambassadors and diplomats from different countries including Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia and Italy were among the participating guests at the opening ceremony.

Movies from Bulgaria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Slovenia, Finland, Denmark and England will be screened during the cultural event.

In addition, ten filmmakers from Europe and Iran are scheduled to hold several workshops during the festival.

Dutch director Jean van de Velde, Cypriot producer Marios Piperides and Swiss producer Thierry Spicher were among the cineastes.

Fereidun Jeirani, Rasul Sadr-Ameli, Mohammad-Mehdi Asgarpur, Maziar Miri, Mehrdad Oskui, Mani Mirsadeqi and Siavash Jamali, all from Iran, held workshops at the event.

Photo: A poster for the European Film Week in Tehran.

RM/YAW