Pelan #55: The Marriage Project
- Director: Atieh Attarzadeh and Hesam Eslami
- Screening: June 17, 2023, 11 a.m.
- /
- North Vancouver City Library
- Run time: 78
Synopsis:
Encourage the patients from a mental hospital to form relationships with each other, get married, and live as a family. That’s the bold new idea of the head of Ehsan House in Southern Tehran. For the past 20 years, 480 patients have lived in separate male and female units. But in 2017, the head of the center secured the money to build a new unit of marital facilities. As a selection committee begins evaluating patients, hidden affections surface. Finally, the team selects two patients to form the first couple. Are these two patients capable of having a relationship that leads to marriage?
Trailer:
https://vimeo.com/398875656/531ec25b67
About the directors:
Atieh Attarzadeh holds a BA and Master in Cinema studies from the University of Tehran and a Master in documentary practice at the University of Bristol. She directed three short documentary films, “40 Days of Pine” (in a mental home – 2016), “17 years old” (2014), and “I Am an Ordinary Woman” (2010). She is also a writer, and her works were published at the prestigious Cheshmeh editing house: “Ride the Horse in a Half of Yourself” (2015 – poetry book) and “The Handbook of Dying with Herbal Medicines” (2016 – novel).
Hesam Eslami, born in 1982 in Ahwaz, south of Iran, got his BFA and MA in cinema from the Tehran University of Art. Since 2009 he started to work as an editor and director and made documentaries for TV channels. Juvenile offenders and social damages are the main themes of his work. In 2017 his first feature-length documentary, “20th Circuit Suspects” (six years in the life of an adolescent crime gang that breaks into cars in the streets of Tehran) premiered at Hot Docs. He attended the Berlinale Talent Campus in February 2018 where he presented his latest project on gold searchers in Iran.