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6:00 PM

Shahid

Filmscreening | Achtung Film!

  • Cinémathèque québécoise, Montréal

  • Original version with French subtitles
  • 13$
  • Part of series: Achtung Film!

SHAHID, dir. Narges Kalhor © Leonie Huber

SHAHID, dir. Narges Kalhor © Leonie Huber


A wildly clever film that’s part reality, part fiction, part theatre and part musical.
- After the success of In the Name of Scheherazade or the First Beergarden in Tehran, presented at the RIDM in Montreal in 2020, here is Narges Kalhor's new film: 

SHAHID 
Dir.: Narges Kalhor
Germany 2024, 86 min.
With Baharak Abdolifard, Nima Nazarinia, Saleh Rozati, Thomas Sprekelsen,  Carine Huber

Director Narges Shahid Kalhor directs an actor playing a version of herself. She doesn’t want to be called "Shahid" (martyr) anymore, and is determined to change her name. Then, her heroic great-grandfather turns up – given the title of martyr 100 years ago in Iran – from whom his descendants inherited the name. He wants to dissuade his great-granddaughter, and shadows her in her quest along with his dancing friends. The Bavarian district administration sends her to a psychologist, who also has a difficult name…

In the end, everyone is hindered: the director by bureaucracy, the actor by the director’s demands, her great-grandfather by his descendant’s determination and the film by itself. The winds of history blow her round and round in circles, through the scenic German town and through her own film shoot, as stereotypes and privileges are shaken up performatively and inventively, all while having a lot of fun along the way. Ambiguous autofiction with visual arcs, songs and poems: a tragicomic, defiant act of self-empowerment in exile.
(Source: 74. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin)