Rafi Pitts

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Rafi Pitts (2007)

Rafi Pitts (* 1967 in Mashhad ) is a British - Iranian film director , screenwriter and film producer . He is one of the most renowned representatives of current Iranian cinema and his films have received a large number of international festival awards. Although Pitts studied and worked abroad, he kept returning to Iran to direct. Dubbed the “Chronicler of the Crises”, his films are colored autobiographically and characterized by strong female figures, while the men are often portrayed as hesitant or fleeing.

biography

childhood and education

Rafi Pitts was born into a family of artists in Iran in 1967 . His father comes from England and was a painter, his mother Malak Khazai is Iranian and a production designer . Pitts' parents had met in London , where his mother had received a scholarship to the Slade School of Arts . Both later moved to Iran. His parents separated when he was five years old, after which his father left Iran. Pitts then grew up with his mother in Tehran , to whom he said he had a close, sibling bond due to the small age difference of 17 years.

At the age of eight he got his first film role in the neorealist Iranian film The Nightingale , which earned him a soccer ball, a dog and a bicycle as a self-negotiated fee. Although he associated negative memories with his first assignment, he appeared in three other films by the age of twelve. The family also moved into an apartment under an editing room, whereupon the film editors working there occasionally watched the boy and let him play with censored footage. Pitts made the acquaintance of many Iranian filmmakers early on, including Abbas Kiarostami , whom he considers one of his teachers.

After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Pitts and his mother left Iran (according to other sources as early as 1978) and they emigrated to London via Paris . From then on he attended school in England, where he was raised in three languages. Although he originally started his training as an editor, Pitts later studied film and camera at London's Harrow College of the Polytechnic . He then worked as a prop master for theater director Peter Brook .

First short films and feature films

Pitts moved to France in 1991 due to better career prospects in the film business. There he was involved as line producer on the compilation film Amnesty International - Writing against Forgetting (1991), which was made on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the human rights organization with the participation of such well-known artists as Patrice Chéreau , Jacques Doillon , Jean-Luc Godard , Alain Resnais and Bertrand Tavernier was born. In the same year he assisted in the shooting of Leos Carax 's award-winning feature film The Lovers of Pont-Neuf before making his first own short film, In Exile (1991). The eleven-minute film, for which Pitts had also written the script, centered on a writer living in exile in France.

Pitts described the collaboration with Jacques Doillon, whom he assisted in the shooting of his feature film W. - Le jeune Werther (1993), as a “real experience” . A year later he first attracted international attention with his 38-minute short film Salandar (1994), which was made in Russia . The story of two soldiers meeting an old man in the desert, set against the backdrop of the war in the Middle East , earned Pitts prizes at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the French Entrevues Film Festival . He was able to build on this success with his feature film debut The Fifth Season (1997), for which he returned to Iran after 17 years and selected the historic village of Abyaneh as a film location.

In his comedy, Pitts tells of two warring families in the Iranian hinterland who are supposed to be appeased by an arranged wedding. On the wedding day, however, the groom refuses his future young wife (played by Roya Nonahali ), whereupon she plans to keep the family tradition and take revenge on the bus operator. Initially struggling with identity problems and perceived as a foreigner in Iran, Pitts had been looking for a universal theme for his first feature film. "[...] I find that the conflicts that appear in the film are timeless," said Pitts. “The female figure has a very strong character, which is typical of the personality of the Iranian woman. It is a fact, contrary to Western beliefs about the position of women in Iran. It is she who makes the decisions and maintains the tension between the families. She holds the family tight and directs them. "

The fifth season , based on a novel by Bahram Bayzai , premiered at the Venice Film Festival in early September 1997 and was the first Franco-Iranian co-production since the Iranian Revolution. Pitts' film was favorably received by Western critics and won several international festival awards, including the special prize of the jury of the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival . In Germany, where the film was released two years later, Hans Messias ( film-dienst ) emphasized the strong female characters who, unlike the men, would not only represent their own positions. Malte Hagener ( the daily newspaper ) praised the director for breaking numerous stereotypes and for depicting “a village cosm, which the reactionary modernity of the Ayatollahs has left without a trace”.

Since his feature film debut, Pitts has repeatedly returned to Iran for his films ("Because my stories and ideas come from this country and belong there. And because my films should be seen there."), Where he regularly struggles with censorship ("Censorship is our language"). Already the fifth season was banned from the domestic cinemas after a successful opening week due to the "completely improper" acting heroine. He would later be denied financial support for filming and further restrictions on performance in Iran. In 2000, Pitts devoted himself to Sanam, his second autobiographical feature film, which he shot in Ahmad Abad , his grandfather's village on the Iranian-Afghan border. In the drama, he again relied on his former leading actress Roya Nonahali, who can be seen as a widow and single mother whose husband was shot for allegedly stealing cattle. Although she protests his innocence, she moves with her traumatized son to her sister-in-law, where she begins to weigh up another marriage. Praised by the French daily Le Monde for his magnificent landscape shots and his “strong and fluid direction”, Pitts again won several prizes at European film festivals, including the main prize at the Paris Film Festival.

"Chronicler of the Crises"

In 2003 Pitts accompanied the American film director of the same name through his hometown New York for the documentary Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty . The film was made as part of the Cinéma de notre temps series of the Franco-German TV channel ARTE . Three years later, Pitts presented his third feature film, It's Winter , which received an invitation to compete at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival in 2006 , but received no award. The drama is based on a novel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi but uses a melancholy poem by Mehdi Achawan Sales as a leitmotif . It tells the story of a man from a village in the outskirts of Tehran who leaves his wife and child in order to work as a foreign worker. When letters and money are missing for months, he is pronounced dead, whereupon a young stranger from the north successfully woos the widow. However, happiness is short-lived.

Pitts stated that he deliberately shot his third feature film from the point of view of the men, while the women, as in his previous works, show their strengths under difficult conditions. Almost two years after its premiere at the Berlinale, the film, which relied on an ensemble of amateur actors, was released in small numbers and subtitled in German cinemas and received great praise from critics. According to Hans-Jörg Rother ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ), Pitts, like his compatriots Amir Naderi and Majid Majidi, would have given the subject of neorealism a new shine and, like some of his Iranian colleagues who went to school with outstanding filmmakers from the former Eastern Bloc, he would have master the art of encryption. Dietmar Kammerer (the daily newspaper) interpreted It's Winter as a direct alternative to the cinema of his mentor Abbas Kiarostami . Like his compatriot, Pitts is also “a chronicler of crises”, but his characters are “existential pedestrians on the edge of snow-covered streets” or in a labyrinth of winding, deserted streets that have long since given up fighting.

Pitts 2010 in Tokyo

In 2010, Pitts received another invitation to compete at the Berlinale for his fourth feature film Zeit des Zorns (original title: Shekarchi , English-language festival title The Hunter ) , in which he also made his debut as an actor. The filmmaker slipped into the role of a former prison inmate, whose wife and daughter were shot dead during a police operation against demonstrations in Tehran. Instead of falling into melancholy apathy, the recreational hunter begins to strike back. The anti-government film was made before the presidential elections in the Iranian capital and in the north of the country and was inspired by a short story by Bozorg Alawis and an actual event. Even before the premiere of Zeit des Zorns, the figure of Ali was interpreted as “something new in contemporary Iranian cinema”, while the film itself was praised as a “Kafkaesque parable about dictatorship and arbitrariness, about the mechanisms of repression”. It's winter and time of anger both go together. “The first film is about a man who is beaten. The second of one to strike back, ”said Pitts. The director breaks "with the mild humanism of the new Iranian film", the touching humanity as expressed by Majidi or Kiarostami, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. After the hopeless gloom of his previous film, Pitts is driving it to extremes here, says Hans-Jörg Rother.

Rafi Pitts lived alternately in Paris and Tehran ("I feel at home on the bottom of the soles of my shoes"). After the Berlinale premiere of Zeit des Zorns , he did not return to Iran. He took sides for his colleagues Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, who were convicted in their homeland, and published an open letter to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , among other things . This was published at the end of December 2010 by the daily newspaper and the time. In the letter, Pitts called for a worldwide, two-hour boycott of all filmmakers on February 11, 2011, the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. He found support from such well-known filmmakers as Sean Penn , Robert Redford , Martin Scorsese , Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola . At the same time, Pitts "sponsored" Panahi's film Offside (2006), which was shown again at the 2011 Berlinale. There he described Panahi's imprisonment as "a crime" and "a great shame".

In 2016, Pitts received his third invitation to Berlin for his feature film Soy Nero , in the competition at the 66th Berlinale . The film follows a Mexican youth who enters the United States illegally and signs up for military service in order to obtain US citizenship.

In 2006 Pitts was appointed to the jury of the Present Competition at the Locarno Film Festival . Three years later, at the 59th Berlinale, together with Hannah Herzsprung, among others , he awarded the prize for the best first work to Adrián Biniez 's competition entry Gigante .

Filmography

Direction and script

  • 1991: In Exile (short film)
  • 1994: Salandar (short film)
  • 1997: The fifth season (Fasl-e panjom)
  • 2000: Sanam
  • 2003: Cinéma, de notre temps (episode: Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty , documentary)
  • 2006: It's Winter (Zemestan)
  • 2010: Time of Wrath (Shekarchi)
  • 2011: 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (short film)
  • 2016: Soy Nero

production

  • 1991: In Exile (short film)
  • 1994: Salandar (short film)
  • 2000: Sanam
  • 2006: It's Winter (Zemestan)

cut

  • 1991: In Exile (short film)
  • 1994: Salandar (short film)
  • 2001: Avant de partir

play

Awards

Festival International du Film d'Amiens

  • 1997: OCIC Grand Prix and Special Jury Prize for The Fifth Season

Art Film Festival

  • 2007: Jury Prize for It's Winter

Berlin International Film Festival

  • 2006 : nominated for the Golden Bear for It's Winter
  • 2010 : nominated for the Golden Bear for Time of Anger

Cinema Jove - Valencia International Film Festival

  • 1998: Golden Moon for The Fifth Season
  • 2001: Golden moon for Sanam

Damascus Film Festival

  • 2007: Golden Award for It's Winter

Entrevues Film Festival

  • 1995: Grand Prix for Salandar
  • 1997: Audience Award for The Fifth Season

International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg

  • 1997: Special Jury Prize for The Fifth Season
  • 2000: Special jury award for Sanam

Palm Springs International Film Festival

  • 2007: New Voices / New Visions Grand Jury Prize for It's Winter

Paris Cinema

  • 2006: Young Talent Award for It's Winter

Paris Film Festival

  • 2001: Grand Prix for the fifth season

San Francisco International Film Festival

  • 1994: Golden Gate Award for Salandar

Seattle International Film Festival

  • 2007: Emerging Masters Showcase Award

Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid

  • 2006: Silver Ear for It's Winter

Vesoul Asian Film Festival

  • 1998: Audience Award for The Fifth Season
  • 2001: Golden Wheel for Sanam

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Short profile of the Berlinale 2009 at berlinale.de (accessed on February 6, 2010).
  2. ↑ a b c d cf. Frodon, Jean-Michel: Rafi Pitts, cinéaste, réalisateur de Sanam . In: Le Monde , May 3, 2001 (accessed January 31, 2010 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft ).
  3. ↑ a b c d e cf. Frois, Emmanuelle: 'Cinquième Saison': Rafi Pitts, retour au pays . In: Le Figaro , January 7, 1998 (accessed December 30, 2010 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft ).
  4. ↑ cf. Azoury, Philippe; Séguret, Olivier: 'D'abord des individus, ensuite des pays' . In: Liberation , May 2, 2001, No. 6208, p. 32.
  5. ↑ a b c d e cf. Dupont, Joan: An Iranian Toys With the Limits of Film . In: International Herald Tribune, December 19, 2000, p. 22.
  6. ↑ a b c d e cf. Nicodemus, Katja: The man who strikes back . In: Die Zeit , January 21, 2010, issue 4, p. 48.
  7. ↑ cf. Baudin, Brigitte: Cinéma: Le cinéaste iranien présente 'Sanam', son deuxième film . In: Le Figaro , May 4, 2001 (accessed January 31, 2010 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft ).
  8. ↑ cf. Press kit for It's Winter ( Memento from January 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) at berlinale.de, 2006 (accessed December 30, 2010).
  9. ↑ cf. Portrait ( memento of January 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) at arte.tv, December 6, 2006 (accessed on December 30, 2010).
  10. ↑ movie review by Hans Messiah in filmdienst 05/1999 (called 31 January 2010 via Munzinger Online ).
  11. ↑ a b Malte Hagener: Armed to catch customers. In: the daily newspaper of April 29, 1999, p. 2.
  12. ↑ cf. Frodon, Jean-Michel: Sur le cheval noir de la vengeance . In: Le Monde, May 3, 2001 (accessed January 31, 2010 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft ).
  13. ↑ a b cf. Kammerer, Dietmar: The country has been paralyzed . In: the daily newspaper, November 1, 2007, p. 16.
  14. ↑ cf. Rother, Hans-Jörg: The Art of Encryption: "It's Winter" . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 31, 2007, No. 253, p. 44.
  15. ↑ cf. Göttler, Fritz: Like on another planet . - Interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 7, 2010, p. 11.
  16. ↑ cf. Rother, Hans-Jörg: He is not allowed to stay by the sea of ​​freedom . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 8, 2010, No. 81, p. 31.
  17. ↑ cf. Rafi Pitts . In: the daily newspaper, January 4, 2011, p. 15.
  18. ↑ cf. Pitts, Rafi: Open Letter to Ahmadinejad . In: the daily newspaper, December 28, 2010, p. 12.
  19. ↑ cf. Tilmann, Christina: Those who defend themselves live . In: Tagesspiegel, February 11, 2011, No. 20885, p. 25.
  20. ↑ cf. Rodek, Hanns-Georg; Tabatabai, Jasmin: The dreams of the Iranians . In: Die Welt, February 16, 2011, No. 39, p. 24.
  21. ↑ cf. Abeltshauser, Thomas: Solidarity with Jafar Panahi - green is the color of protest . In: Berliner Morgenpost, February 12, 2011, No. 42, p. 23.
  22. ↑ cf. Halligan, Fionnuala: Locarno's line-up boasts more US films . In: Screen International, July 12, 2006 (accessed January 30, 2010 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft ).
personal data
SURNAME Pitts, Rafi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Iranian film director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Mashhad