Resistance festival to pay tribute to film expert Akbar Alemi
TEHRAN – (Iranart)- The organizers of the 16th Resistance International Film Festival will pay tribute to veteran Iranian film scholar Akbar Alemi who died of COVID-19 last week.
“Alemi was one of the influential figures in cinema after the Islamic Revolution,” Ahad Mikailzadeh, an official in charge of the festival has said.
“He had a great role in educating talented and committed students besides his many art and cultural activities,” he said.
“He always paid due attention to the development and elevation of cinema and he was one of those great masters both in theory and in practice,” he noted.
Alemi was the dean of the Animation Department at Tehran’s Tarbiat Modares University.
He helped develop academic cinema during the years it was about to fade away in the country with his TV programs “Other Side of the Coin”, “Seventh Art” and “Beyond Cinema” during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Alemi was born in 1945 in Ahvaz, and was a graduate of cinema from the Dramatic Art College. He continued his studies in England and got his Ph.D. in cinema.
He has written and translated many books and was active as a jury member of several Iranian and international film and animation festivals.
He was also a member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.
Alemi was one of the pioneers of documentary making in the country and presented modern methods in the documentary genre.
He had also written several books on photography.
The Resistance festival has been organized in two stages, the first of which took place during the Sacred Defense Week from September 21 to 28.
The first edition of the festival opened at the Sacred Defense Museum in Tehran in September paying tribute to five cineastes of the Iranian war cinema who had died over the past year.
Those were filmmaker Khosro Sinai, producer Hadi Meshkat, documentarians Hossein Fahimi and Gholamreza Janantkhah, and composer Reza Atarodi.
The second part of the festival will be held from November 21 to 27 to celebrate the anniversary of Basij Day, which falls on November 25.
source: Tehran Times