more-in The minimalistic human stories from Iran have always been a huge drawn at film festivals here. At this year’s International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), a lesser known, but equally vibrant face of Iranian cinema is on display, featuring its new crop of short-filmmakers, who have been making waves at festivals across the world. Titled ‘Persian Tales,’ the package, curated by acclaimed short filmmaker Amir Masoud Soheili, has 14 films quite diverse in its content and form. The first set of eight films were screened at the festival on Saturday. “Usually, much of Iranian cinema is centred around Tehran. But our short films are more diverse and represents all regions. I tried to create a package that included straight narratives, experimental films and animation works,” said Mr. Soheili. Soheili has quite a reputation, having been invited as a jury to hundreds of short film festivals across the world. His own film Blue Eyed Boy was one of the highlights of the package on the first day, telling the allegorical tale of a young boy afflicted with a particular kind of colour blindness, by which he sees the whole world in blue. The superstitious elders around him find a solution that would draw out all the colour from his life. Icky, an animation film directed by Parastoo Cardgar, is similar. It is a world where everyone’s heads are represented by Rubik’s cubes, with all of them perfectly solved, having the same colours on each side. Amid them is one whose head is a little imperfect, whose Rubik’s cube is yet to be solved, a problem which the society around the person takes upon themselves. Another animation film Maned and Macho is about a girl whose emotions come out in the form of wild creatures. These animation films are a world away from contemporary Hollywood big studio animations. They all have that hand-drawn, painting-like quality, with the lines flowing smoothly across the screen. Animal, directed by Bahman Ark, takes one close to Iran’s borders where a man tries to smuggle himself across the borders hiding under a ram’s skin and head. The man almost becomes the animal, closely studying and aping its movements for the perfect cross across the border.The second set of films in the package will be screened on Sunday.

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