CINEMA TEHRAN, OSLO #9 + FILM FROM THE SOUTH: SHAYDA (2023)

Program

• 17:45: Introduction by Lasse Skagen
• 18:00: Fatemeh Ekhtesari - poetry reading from She Is Not a Woman
• 18:15: Shayda (eng sub)
• 20:15: The End
• Ticket link coming soon

ABOUT SHAYDA

The audience winner from this year's Sundance Film Festival tells a powerful and beautifully crafted story about Persian mother Shayda and her 6-year-old daughter Mona, who have sought refuge in a shelter in Melbourne.

She has run away from her abusive husband Hossein during the celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebration, and has filed for divorce. In her temporary new home, she does her best to create new relationships and friends, while trying to keep the ones they had before. A possible new way out of captivity, in a dysfunctional and violent marriage. But when Hossein is granted visitation rights for Mona by a judge, a series of events set in motion that have unexpected consequences.

DIRECTOR

Noora Niasari is an Iranian-Australian filmmaker and co-founder of Parandeh Pictures. She has a background in architecture and later studied Film and Television at the Victorian College of the Arts. After several short films, she debuted with the feature film Shayda, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023.

AUTHOR – POEM READING

Fatemeh Ekhtesari (b. 1986) is a poet, editor, human rights activist, and midwife from Iran. She has published four collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, and two collections of prose texts in Persian. Together with Mehdi Mousavi, she was the editor of the magazine Hamin farda bood until it was banned and closed in 2008.

In 2015, Ekhtesari fled Iran after being sentenced to ninety-nine lashes and eleven and a half years in prison. She came to Lillehammer as an ICORN-writer in 2017. A bunch of her poems were first presented in Norwegian translation in the anthology Å kysse en ørken, å kysse en myr (Aschehoug 2019). The following year came Vi overlever ikke, a wide selection of Ekhtesari's poems in Nina Zandjani's translation (Transfer 2020). Her poems have previously been translated into many languages, including English, German, Swedish, and Spanish. She currently runs a Persian online magazine, in addition to publishing her own texts to her many followers on social media. Ekhtesari has received several prizes and awards for her writing internationally, participated in several literature festivals, and in a short time became a clear voice on the Norwegian poetry scene as well. She is Not a Woman is her first newly written poetry collection in Norway and has been produced in parallel in Persian and Norwegian.

We had earlier informed about sale of Iranian food at this event, but this is sadly not happening. We apologise!