Sanaeeha and Moghaddam: “We opened archives to make the film as real as possible about what happened and is still happening in Iran”

Iranian filmmakers Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam presented their feature film Ghasideyeh Gave Sefid [Ballad of a White Cow], a story based on a miscarriage of justice that leads to the death of an innocent man, in the Official Section of the 66th edition of Seminci today Tuesday, 26th October 2021. The plot is inspired by the personal experiences of the director and star, Maryam Moghaddam, whose father was killed for political reasons, which caused the family to grow up with such deep pain.

Injustice is the link between the death of her father and her husband in the fiction and, along with the experience, the two filmmakers “went to a lot of trouble” to investigate the subject, which led them to interviewing numerous families of people killed for political or religious reasons and to contact lawyers and figures linked to the death penalty. All this, they explained, allowed them to open files of exiled people so that the film would be as real as possible about what was happening and still continues to happen in Iran.

The film, which takes its title from a verse of the Koran about forgiveness based on the idea that the cow has a special significance in different cultures, is the result of a long work of the directors, who, sharing time and life, talk about many issues from which ideas emerge that, over the weeks, are translated into a script. This process, which is long, continued with the choice of the characters, although it was not until the moment of shooting that the script and characters were adjusted.

In this case, additionally, Maryam Moghaddam is the star of the film, so when the time came to shoot, she committed herself completely to the interpretation role while he got behind the camera to carry out a project that, as they explained, had a different ending to the one that viewers can watch today, which seeks its balance between revenge and forgiveness.

Ghasideyeh Gave Sefid was screened today Tuesday at 16.00h at Calderón and Carrión theatres, and will be shown again tomorrow, Wednesday 27th August, at Broadway cinemas at 19.30h.