TEHRAN-A lineup of four Iranian films will go on screen in different sections of the 50th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the organizers have announced.

Director Nushin Meraji’s debut movie “The Son” will be screened in the Bright Future section of the festival, while “Silence” by Amir-Ali Navai will compete in the short film section.

“The Son” is about forty-year-old Farid, who lives with his mother. He is very vulnerable and escapes loneliness, but in the meantime tries to prove himself independent and supportive of his mother.

However, her sudden death makes Farid frustrated. To escape from this unfamiliar situation, he clings to anyone he encounters outside home to make this loneliness bearable, but he does not know how to communicate and the situation gets worse each time.

“Silence” tells the story of a modern playwright Nader, who follows in Mansour Hallaj’s footsteps. Eleven hundred years earlier Hallaj said he is God and refused to answer the questions his statement provoked. Instead, he calmly awaited his execution. Now the tragic history repeats itself, once again accompanied by a curious crowd and an accepting silence.

The festival will also screen Shahram Mokri’s “Careless Crime” and veteran Iranian filmmaker Masud Kimiai’s acclaimed 1974 movie “The Deer” in Cinema Regained section.

“Careless Crime” goes back forty years to the uprising to overthrow the Shah’s regime in Iran when protestors set fire to movie theaters as a way of showing opposition to Western culture. Many cinemas were burned down. In one tragic case, a theater was set on fire with four hundred people inside, most of whom were burned alive. Forty years have passed, and in contemporary Iran, four individuals also decide to burn down a cinema. Their intended target is a theater showing a film about an unearthed, unexploded missile.

“The Deer” is about Seyyed, who is a drug addict working small jobs in a theatre to pay for his heavy addiction. One day he is visited by an old friend, Ghodrat, for whom he was a role model and protector when they were teenagers.

Ghodrat has just been shot by the police when an armed robbery went wrong and is now looking for a safe place to lay low for a while. Hence, he comes to stay with the only person that he could trust, Seyyed. However, what he sees is miles away from the Seyyed that he knew and had in mind.

International Film Festival Rotterdam will be held in the Dutch city from June 2 to 6.

Photo: A scene from “Careless Crime” by Iranian director Shahram Mokri.

ABU/MG