It was, with nine nominations and the best director prize, the flagship film of the Fajr Film Festival which celebrates the seventh Persian art each year in Tehran. The drama The Night Watchman by director Reza Mirkarimi has been selected to represent Iran at the Oscars, the 96th edition of which will take place on March 10, 2024.
After examining 42 eligible works, pre-selecting 15 of them to narrow the choice to three feature films, the selection committee of the Farabi foundation “chose the film Negahban-é Shab (The Night Watchman) as representative of the cinema Iranian,” announced this organization which depends on the Ministry of Culture of the Islamic Republic.
Released in 2022, this feature film tells the story of Rassoul, a village worker who must choose between his moral values and money when he comes to work in Tehran.
Reza Mirkarimi, 56, exploits themes linked to religion and traditions in his films with a humanist approach. We owe him Under the Moonlight, which won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, and So Close, So Far, which won the Best Film Prize at the Fajr Festival in Tehran in 2005. the third time that Reza Mirkarimi has been chosen by the authorities of his country to represent Iran at the Hollywood high mass.
To have a chance of winning the statuette next March, The Night Watchman must now manage to find a place on the list of 15 films preselected at the beginning of January by the Oscar committee in charge of the best international film prize. Only five of these feature films will be nominated on January 23. Each year, nearly a hundred foreign films are sent to the American Cinema Academy.
Persian cinema has been nominated for the Oscars twice. The famous Iranian director Asghar Farhadi won the Oscar for best foreign film: in 2011 for A Separation then in 2017 for The Client, a French co-production.
