The 1st Tehran International Silent Film Festival will be held in February 2016, in Tehran.
Supported by Art University of Tehran, the festival, focusing on nonverbal films, has no equivalence in the Middle East and is the second of its type in Asia, Fars News Agency reported.
The festival will include two sections of National Cinema and International Cinema. Both sections will work in the form of a competition where the best works will be awarded. The presented films are in various formats of fiction, documentary, animation, and experimental. National Cinema also includes an out-of-competition section for the audience.
“Over 1300 submissions have been made to the secretariat,” said Alireza Qasemi, founder and director of the festival. He also noted that the event has been warmly received by non-Iranian participants.
An exclusive section will be dedicated to great silent films like those by Charlie Chaplin.
Silent films refer to films without dialogue or narration. These films recount their world through the language of imagery, as a painting would do. The event aims to gather, screen and respect these creative films.
When silent movies were first shown (in the 1890s) they were the absolute cutting edge of technology, there was nothing to rival them - radio broadcasting hadn’t been developed then let alone television, and photography was still in its infancy.
The cinemas, where the films were shown, were not silent as almost every film was accompanied by a live musician, a small orchestra in some cases. The advent of movies also brought a revolution for acting - directors, actors, used to perform on the stage, had to develop a visual language due to the limitations of having no voice. So it can be said that silent film was the base of today’s modern cinema.
The idea for running such a festival was raised in 2013 by a small student project. The organizers aim to eliminate dialogue and deliver dramatic actions to the picture as the main element of cinema in a bid to take a step forward in reinforcing the language of cinema.
