TEHRAN – The Iranian feature film “K-Poper” directed by Ebrahim Azizi has won the top award of the 9th Eurasian Creative Guild (ECG) Film Festival in London, England.

A production of 2025, the drama received the Best Feature Film Award of the festival, which was held last week, Honaronline reported.

“K-Poper” follows a teenage girl who becomes fascinated by a Korean pop star and dreams of traveling to Seoul, despite her mother’s opposition. It is a story rooted in Iran, but its subject is immediately recognizable: pop culture, generational tension, and the private worlds young people build for themselves.

In the 83-minute movie, Maede is a 16-year-old girl who lives in the city of Shiraz in southern Iran. Her life completely revolves around K-pop, and her biggest dream is to travel to Seoul to meet her idol and participate in a young music talent competition that could change her whole life. 

But the journey towards her dreams is not easy: the girl's passion collides with a strict home upbringing and her mother's deep concern about whether such a world is safe and suitable for her daughter. The focus of the film is a young woman's struggle for her dreams in a cultural space that may not always understand or support her choices. 

Maede's inner growth, decisions, failures, and small victories form a deeply personal yet universal story of self-discovery. 

It is a tense drama that gives voice to a generation of young people whose lives and dreams are closely intertwined with global pop culture and local values.

The cast includes Sareh Bayat, Setayesh Dehghan, Mehdi Hashemi, and Ali Bagheri

ECG Film Festival is a platform for the development of cinema in the Eurasian region. The aim of the festival is to promote Eurasian cinema in the English-speaking space and to acquaint Eurasian representatives of the film industry with professionals from all over the world. To acquaint the world with the works that personify the connection of the Eurasian countries and peoples. Show opportunities for collaboration, joint development, and growth.

For 8 years, the festival has been held in partnership with the Romford Film Festival. Romford Film Festival is a stable, well-established festival that is attended by a large number of experts. This association is the surest solution for attracting the maximum amount of attention from the press, viewers, and experts to the Eurasian cinema.

The ECG film festival features such works as feature films, short films, animated films, documentaries, book trailers, screenplays, mobile video, and music clips.

Other winners of this year’s edition of the festival showcased the range of the program. The animation prize went to Swiss photographer Bellopropello for a film about the way smartphones are reshaping human behavior. Best Documentary was awarded to Russian director Vladimir Sumashedov for a film about an artist who tries to confront the violence of World War II through art. The Best Book Trailer award went to Armenian writer Elena Aslanyan’s “The Gold of the Aryans”.

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