Night Watchman, a good choice for Oscar 2024

According to the film reporter of Fars News Agency, the selection of Iran’s representative at the Oscars is an important event for cinema people, a film that can be a suitable or inappropriate representative for Iranian cinema and its thinking.

For filmmakers and even those interested in the field of cinema, the Oscars may be like a world cup in the field of art, a festival that all countries with leading cinemas in every period are concerned about participating in. Iran is not exempt from this issue and has faced challenges in every period to introduce the selection committee of Iran’s representative in this academy.

Now this year, the selection committee for Iran’s representative at the Oscar Academy 2024 at the Farabi Cinema Foundation selected Reza Mirkarimi’s film from among the three final films “Private Meetings” directed by Omid Shams, “Night Watchman” by Reza Mirkarimi and “Shahrek” by Ali Hazrati. Iran chose in the Oscars.

Definitely, among the 3 final candidates, “Night Watchman” is the best choice, even the cinematic appearance of “Shahrek” in this list is remarkable because it may not even have the minimum features of a good movie.

“Night Watchman” is the cinema itself, a film that tries to present a noble work in the conceptually chaotic atmosphere of Iranian body cinema. If we believe that works like “Fossil” are necessary and suitable for the revival of the box office and the prosperity of cinema, then works like “Night Watchman” are definitely necessary and necessary to keep semantic cinema alive.

In the 40th Fajr Film Festival, “Negheban Shab” was nominated for 9 Crystal Simorghs and was able to win the Crystal Simorgh for the best director and the honorary diploma for the best supporting actor.

Cinema critic Seyed Arya Qureshi said about this film: “In his latest work, Reza Mirkarimi has gone to the repetitive pattern of a simple village character entering the city and facing unknown crises. This story line quickly creates two dangers for the screenwriter and director: one is to fall into the trap of showing everything dirty and dirty, and second is to limit everything to repeated themes such as class differences and ignore the importance of dealing with the individuality of the characters. Fortunately, the film “Night Watchman” escapes from both traps. The film benefits from Mirkarimi’s clean and “cinematic” performance; A performance that is not enough to cut close-ups of the characters to each other and creates the space of that range for us. Also, Mirkarimi tried to add depth to the characters and refrain from making general types.

Also, Ali Seifolahi, another film critic, said: “The Night Watchman could have been similar to other films from the many social dramas of Iranian cinema. Look at the story material of the film; A poor and innocent worker, a family from the lowest social class, an old man who suffers from amnesia, a deaf girl, a woman who separated from her drug addict husband with three children, an absent son and brother whose death has become a great tragedy for his family. He has become a contractor who did not fulfill his promise to build teachers’ houses and has access to a network of the rich and powerful class of society. With a combination of these story materials and characters, “Night Watchman” can make a story of the extreme contrast between the lives of the people at the bottom and the top of the society, but all these thematic elements are present and absent in “Night Watchman”. All of them have been diluted in different layers of the film and made a pleasant and thought-provoking composition.

Last year, the delay in announcing the name of Iran’s representative in Oscar 2023 made news, and finally the movie “World War III” made by Homan Sidi entered the competition, although this choice for a movie was not successful and this movie did not receive an award.

The year before that and in Oscar 2022, the film “Hero” directed by Asghar Farhadi went to this festival. Contrary to media speculation and the film showing a few minutes of applause at the time of its release, “Hero” is also in the final list of nominees for the best international film. There was not.

It seems that regardless of the success or failure of Mirkarimi’s film at the Oscars, a work worthy of the thinking of Iranian cinema has been sent to the Oscar Academy.

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