Make the popular Simorgh transparent and clean!

Theater News Base: In the 30th edition of the Fajr Film Festival, the management of ticket sales and registration of popular votes was entrusted to the Sales and Screening Management System (SIMFA) so that after years of cinema being in charge of public voting, this union would not even intervene as an observer. . This happened at a time when the final decision on how to hold the Fajr Festival and the licensing of public cinemas was all influenced by the spread of the corona, and this made things difficult or slow.

At that time, despite the fact that the cinema house had been in a new way of voting for several years after trial and error, the SAMFA system was used for this purpose, but this system created a lot of margins.

Last year, the producer of the film “Ablaq” (Mohammad Hossein Ghasemi) said in this regard before the end of the festival, following the emergence of margins in the popular vote: It seems that the face of the popular Simorgh of this period of the festival has no credibility.

Although in the end, this film won Simorgh the best work from the viewers’ point of view, but it was stated that for some other films, the number of viewers who watched a film in the cinema was not proportional to the number of votes added to that film. In a system that even disrupted ticket sales, it was shrouded in mystery.

Now, in the fortieth season, one of the producers present at the festival emphasizes that, as now the amount of audience and sales in cinemas and even screenplays is quite clear in detail, the popular votes of the Fajr Festival must also have the necessary transparency.

Ali Sartipi – Producer of “Shahrak” – says: ‌ There are problems in the voting process for the best film of the Fajr Film Festival, which unfortunately happened in previous years, including the fact that the owners of the films paid 200 to 300 million Tomans and bought tickets for their films. And this is a problem that needs to be solved so that those who vote can both buy tickets themselves and be in the cinema and watch the movie.

He expressed hope that this year, during the 40th term, there will be transparency in the popular vote.

Last year, Ali Ashtiani-Pour, who was in charge of the popular vote at the Fajr Film Festival for five years and was in charge of the Cinema House, told ISNA about the same issue: Give it to him. What we thought we had eaten liver blood for five years was to affect only those who are direct viewers and those who are definitely in the movie theater. Anyone who could influence the vote was removed from the ballot box, and the end result was something we could swear with our eyes closed. In the process of transparency, the existence of credible documents should be important for the officials, because in any case, one of the film owners is satisfied with the award and the others are dissatisfied, and that one person has such a right that his god is also satisfied. It must be more important than anything.

Because the popular Simorgh of Fajr Festival is considered by the audience, for many filmmakers and even people interested in cinema, the best film of the festival is considered more important and attractive than Simorgh. Transparency and accuracy of votes are many times more important. Of course, it is not clear yet whether the cinema house is responsible for the popular voting of the festival or the SAMFA system, which was recently provided to the Cinema City Institute under the management of Hashem Mirzakhani, but it is expected that the 40th Fajr Festival will no longer be a time of trial and error. There is no prize.