Tehroun

Nader T. Homayoun was born in Paris in 1968 and went to Iran for the first time during the years of the Islamic revolution. In 1993 he passed the test for admission to the direction department at la fémis in Paris. Already selected at the Venice Film Festival for his short film C'est pour bientôt (2000), in 2005 he directed the documentary Iran, Une révolution cinématographique, a history of Iran told through its cinema, presented at several international film festivals. Tehroun is his first feature film."My origins are Iranian, and after having grown up in Teheran I have lived in France for a number of years, and I wanted my first film to reflect this double identity (...). From the writing through the shoot right up to postproduction, I decided to use both French and Iranian crews. Making a film on Tehroun, and not Teheran, was the real challenge. There is Teheran, the capital of Iran, the official face of the country, the place that is the showcase of the modernity of the petro-monarchy. But there is also Tehroun, the Teheran of the slums, the invisible city they try to hide (...). Teheran is not an old city. It is barely 200 years old. And yet Teheran is the incarnation of the Iranian dream: the place where anything can happen, where people dream of a radiant future, of a bright tomorrow. Ibrahim, the main character, is an ordinary hero. He plays a double game and wallows in lies (...). The double game is one of the constants in the film and characterises each character (...), in the image of the population which, at the end of the day, also prefers to hide its hand until it lets itself go in the evening in private parties. Tehroun is a film noir, dark in its vision of Iranian society, dark in the way out it gives to its protagonists. Tehroun is a genre film and continues a certain aspiration to realism which sometimes gives it an almost documentary feel. (...) The link between the characters and space is so strong that social fatalism, an actual prison enclosing each character in their situations, is reflected in the filming of the city which gives no wide shots and from which exudes an atmosphere of oppression.Unfortunately, Tehroun can no longer be screened in Iran. The themes covered, such as prostitution, trafficking, the mafia, (...) are all themes which brush the authorities up the wrong way and which gore official images".