Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly will open this year’s Summer Film School. Ghobadi will be awarded the ACFC Annual Prize.
Bahman Ghobadi won recognition in 1999 with his short documentary Life in Fog and with feature-length movie A Time for Drunken Horses. The latter one captures everyday life of the Kurdish kids living on the border of Iran and Iraq and won the Caméra d’Or for the best debut. Ghobadi’s third film Turtles Can Fly is set in a refugee camp. Ghobadi was forced to leave his country after making the No One Knows About Persian Cats and had to shoot the following Rhino Season with Monika Bellucci in Istanbul. His latest Flag Without a Country, a documentary portrait of Kurdistan, was made in Iraq and proves Ghobadi’s persistent efforts to show the truth about the nation living under permanent threat.
“Bahman Ghobadi is a key representative of Iranian and Kurdish cinema and his voice resonates at all world film festivals. After Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, we are very honoured to welcome him at Summer Film School,” says senior programmer Jan Jílek.