Oblivion verses
Los versos del olvido
Alireza Khatami
The 70-year-old morgue warden can remember everything. He remembers everything except names, including his own. On the eve of retiring, he takes care of the vagrants' morgue, on the edge of an immense graveyard. With him are the mystical gravedigger, who only digs the graves of people he knows the story of, and the hearse driver, pursued by a dark past. An old woman visits the morgue every month looking for her daughter who disappeared 30 years ago. The warden's routine is disturbed when the militia come into the morgue to get rid of the bodies of civilians killed during demonstrations.
With : Juan Margallo, Tomás del Estal, Manuel Morón, Itziar Aizpuru, Julio Jung, Gonzalo Robles
scénario : Alireza Khatami
image : Antoine Héberlé
son : Miroslav Babic, Markus Krohn, Tom Korr
montage : Florent Mangeot
scénario : Alireza Khatami
image : Antoine Héberlé
son : Miroslav Babic, Markus Krohn, Tom Korr
montage : Florent Mangeot
Production : Vincent Wang, Fred Bellaïche, Dominique Welinski, House on Fire
Distribution: Bodega
International sales: UDI - Urban Distribution International
Distribution: Bodega
International sales: UDI - Urban Distribution International
Alireza Khatami was born in 1980 in Iran, and is an independent filmmaker whose trademark is folding fantasy elements into otherwise realistic narratives. Alireza started his career in 2000 as an assistant to several Iranian directors, including Asghar Farhadi. He later studied visual effects in Malaysia, and then went on to receive his Master of Fine Arts degree in film production from the Savannah College of Art & Design. His latest short film Mr. Chang's New Address premiered at Directors' Fortnight of Cannes Film Festival in 2013. The same year he was a laureate of the Fondation Gan pour le Cinéma. After teaching cinema in Beirut for three years he moved to Chicago, where he is now an assistant professor.
“Oblivion Verses is inspired by tragic events that are close to my heart. For years I did not have the courage to revisit these memories. It was only after mediating the events through a different language and geography could I speak of them and understand that historical amnesia prepares the way for violence to be repeated. Oblivion Verses is about the ethical demand to remember the past and resist the violence of forgetting as a form of personal redemption. A reflection on the politics of memory, it is a poetic homage to those who fight to seek justice for the unknown” (Alireza Khatami).
“Oblivion Verses is inspired by tragic events that are close to my heart. For years I did not have the courage to revisit these memories. It was only after mediating the events through a different language and geography could I speak of them and understand that historical amnesia prepares the way for violence to be repeated. Oblivion Verses is about the ethical demand to remember the past and resist the violence of forgetting as a form of personal redemption. A reflection on the politics of memory, it is a poetic homage to those who fight to seek justice for the unknown” (Alireza Khatami).