‘A Thousand And One’ & ‘The Persian Version’ Top 2023 Sundance Film Festival Awards

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been released from Evin prison in Tehran.

Sony Pictures Classics has taken North American on Maryam Keshavarz’s The Persian Version which won the Audience Award (U.S. Dramatic Competition) and The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award (U.S. Dramatic Competition) at this year’s Sundance. Keshavarz is the first filmmaker to have two films win the Sundance Audience Award in the Dramatic Competition category.

Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, French filmmaker Alice Diop and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu have demanded that Iran’s Fajr International Film Festival remove their films from the line-up of its current edition, running from February 1 to 11.

Dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has gone on hunger strike to protest his ongoing detention at Iran’s notoriously harsh Evin prison, even though his sentence has been declared void by the country’s Supreme Court.

Holy Spider star Zar Amir Ebrahimi led a demonstration in support of the people of Iran and the artists who have been detained by the country’s political regime at the Göteborg Film Festival Tuesday evening.

The Sundance Film Festival has begun unveiling its Jury and Audience Award winners for 2023.

Three. Frustrating. Years. That’s how much time has passed since the Sundance Film Festival last held an in-person edition in Park City, Utah. (Put it this way: The opening night selection was the Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana, which chronicled the making of her 2018 album of Reputation. So, like, ancient history.) Blame the pandemic, of course. Because of safety fears, attendees couldn’t be in the room for the premiere of the eventual Oscar Best Picture winner, Coda, or cheer along for Questlove and the first screening of his own future Oscar pic, Summer of Soul. No sightings of a random Real Housewives star on the bustling Main Street. No napping during 8:30 AM screenings. No huffing and puffing walking in the snow in the frigid weather at high altitudes. No nothing.

A few weeks after Zar Amir-Ebrahimi won the Best Actress Award in Cannes for her performance as journalist Arezoo Rahimi in crime thriller Holy Spider, the Iranian-French actor flew to Melbourne, Australia, to take part in what was set to be another urgent story from an Iranian filmmaker: Noora Niasari’s debut feature Shayda. 

Winter runway! Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway and more stars took over Sundance Film Festival 2023 — and made the event all about their stylish ensembles.

There is so much to appreciate about A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One. The film chronicles the lives of native New Yorkers from 1994-2005, which was a period of transition in NYC. The atmosphere began to change, as stop and frisk was over-utilized, gentrification was displacing the people of Harlem at rapid speed, and the culture of the city gave way to sterilization. Now there are even fewer resources available, the wage gap is beyond repair and it’s unaffordable. Rockwell drew inspiration from this and created a coming-of-age story about finding an identity and chosen family.

Theater Camp is a hilarious film by first time directors Molly Gordon (Booksmart), and Nick Lieberman. This was a collaborative effort between friends as it’s written by Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Nick Lieberman, and Noah Galvin. You can tell this is a labor of love because while it’s kooky, it’s full of vulnerability and earnestness. 

The Persian Version, directed and written by Maryam Keshvarz stars Layla Mohammadi, and Niousha Noor as a mother and daughter at odds with one another.

The thorny, complicated history between the United States and Iran is infinitely more complex for those of the Persian diaspora living in America. It’s this nuanced tension trickling down to identity — between being too much this and not enough that in either homeland — that writer-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz (“Circumstance”) explores in her third film, “The Persian Version,” a decades and generation-spanning dramedy.