‘Close-Up: Sanaz Azari’

Bozar will show two documentaries of Sanaz Azari. The documentaries will be preceded by the short film Bread and Alley by Abbas Kiarostami.

The Bread and Alley is a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread. A small and simple film that on the other hand contains all the elements that keep returning in Kiarostami’s later oeuvre.

2010 - Salaam Isfahan by Sanaz Azari ​​- Documentary - 59 min 
Under the pretext of taking pictures of passers-by, the director took the pulse of Iran on the eve of the June 2009 elections, which would see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad return to power. The film portrays a society before, during and after the elections, a short period of dreams where change was taking shape.

2014 - I for Iran by Sanaz Azari - Documentary - 50 min 
​​​​​​​Using a manual dating from the Islamic revolution, the director learns to read and write Persian, her mother tongue. The didactic nature of the lessons gradually changes into a poetic and visual collage that questions the meaning of a revolution.

The screenings will be followed by a conversation with Sanaz Azari and Bamchade Pourvali.

Sanaz Azari was born in Isfahan (Iran) in 1981. She grew up and lives in Brussels where she studied stage design at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, after studying photography. In parallel to her studies, she followed intensive theatre courses for three years according to the Stanislavski method. In 2010, she created set designs and urban installations before writing and directing her first documentary entitled Salaam Isfahan, which was followed by I comme Iran and Backstage Action.

Bamchade Pourvali is a writer and film critic. He is a specialist in cinematic essays and the author of Chris Marker (Cahiers du cinéma, 2003), Godard neuf zéro, les films des années 90 de Jean-Luc Godard (Séguier, 2006), Wong Kar-wai, la modernité d'un cinéaste asiatique (l'Amandier, 2007) and of a dossier on Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera for the CNDP website.

In the framework of the EU Project HerMaP – Heritage and Management Project Europe-Iran