Pelan #41: President Mir Qanbar
- Director: Mohammad Shirvani
- Screening: April 26, 2020, 7 p.m.
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- Cloud video Screening via Zoom
- Run time: 70
Mir Qanbar is a 75-year-old retired civil servant from a remote province far from Tehran, the capital of Iran. He is taking part in the presidential elections and campaign. He has tried to get into Parliament five times before and on three previous occasions to become president, but was disqualified on all manner of grounds. His campaign team is made up of one staff member, the disabled Seifollah, who has been promised a position as Minister of Health. The means available to Mir Qanbar and Seifollah on their campaign are a donkey, pamphlets and a megaphone, with which they travel from village to village. Mir Qanbar is a poor villager, so he understands better than anyone what the people need: this, in essence, is his message. But in order to help the people, he must first be accepted as a candidate.
About the filmmaker:
Mohammad Shirvani is an Iranian alternative filmmaker. He was born in 1973 in Tehran; he quit painting to follow his passion for cinema. Shirvani has escaped from military service to make his first short film "The Circle" in 1999. This film was selected for the Critics' Week International Cannes festival in the same year. As of 2013, Shirvani has made 18 films; the last one "Fat Shaker" won the Golden Tiger for the best film at Rotterdam Film Festival. His films have been screened in more than 500 international events where he won many prizes, such as; Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Locarno, Toronto, Tribeca and Busan. Although he could not screen them widely in his homeland.