Iranian Filmmaker Wins Top Accolade at Ealing's First Film Festival

Ava’s Silence by Seyed Gholamreza Nematpour wins twice over

Seyed Gholamreza Nematpour

Ealing's First Film Festival has awarded the highest accolade, '"Best Film" title to the Iranian filmmaker Seyed Gholamreza Nematpour.

Ava’s Silence, which also won the Narrative Drama category, received high praise from the judges in a strong field of entries from around the world. It tells the story of a young woman who is running her father’s car repair workshop because of his illness. She is waiting for her brother to return home from military service so she can get married. Seyed says  of his film: “The hero of my story is a woman. There is a tragic paradox in this character, being heroine and victim simultaneously.The responsibility of her own family is on her slender shoulders. And there is a love waiting for her on the road of life. But love can also be a load or pressure for women like Ava.”

Entries in the Narrative Drama category were judged by Coky Giedroyc, a film and TV director with many professional credits to her name. “Ava’s Silence is a very good film,” she says in her judging notes. “Beautifully constructed, shot, and acted…a powerful, engrossing story with a very surprising end…melancholic and truthful…a great sense of place and time.”
She named it the best drama, and the judges of the other categories were equally impressed, voting it the overall winner of the festival by a clear margin.

Seyed, who is 44, has made fourteen films in a variety of genres. He teaches writing and filmmaking at the Youth Cinema Society in his home city of Khorramabad in the west of the country. Iran’s independent filmmakers have won a worldwide reputation for the quality of their productions. Their films reflect the lives of ordinary people and are usually shot on location, often with nonprofessional actors. Over the years, Iranian filmmakers have faced difficulties at home because of government censorship, sometimes even resulting in arrest and imprisonment. But their work has reached a global audience through international film festivals, winning critical acclaim and many awards.

Overall, there were 160 entries from 20 countries on five continents.
All the Winners, including several from Ealing, can be found and viewed here

Sixty films which were given Official Selection status have been screened on the EFF website, and nearly three thousand votes were cast from viewers and the winner of the People's Choice award is 19 year old MetFilm student Luca Pappalardo from Sicily for his Black and White short " I wait for the dawn".

Luca Pappalardo

EFF Organisers, Ealing residents Annemarie Flanagan, Peter Gould and Alan Granley have been delighted by the successful first film festival and said:

"'Thank you to this year's sponsors, the judges and all the filmmakers for taking part in this our inaugural festival. We will be back in 2021, bigger and better, "shining a spotlight on new talent" once more.''

December 31st 2020