An event honoring the work of acclaimed Iranian actor Behrouz Vossoughi was held on Sunday, November 4, 2012 at the Olympion Theatre in the context of the 53rd International Thessaloniki Film Festival. Festival director Dimitri Eipides and director Bahman Ghobadi attended the event. The Festival is hosting a tribute to the work of Mr. Ghobadi.
“Behrouz Vossoughi is a living legend of Iranian cinema. In a career stretching over 40 years, he appeared in 90 films, writing his own special chapter in the history of Iranian cinema. You will shortly have the chance to watch the mature, sensitive and outstanding performance of Vossoughi in Bahman Ghobadi’s latest film, Rhino Season”, said Mr. Eipides in his opening remarks.
The actor was prevented by an accident to attend the ceremony. He did send a written message, however, to the attendees. “It is really hard for me to express in words what it meant to make this film, after a 30-year hiatus from the screen and what this break meant for my psychology. Perhaps the best way to put it is that I felt like the film’s main character,
a lonely man wandering in the wilderness, desperately trying to find a drop of water. Rhino Season was for me like a spring, and I drank from it with both my hands. It was a great relief”. He then wished that the audience keeps in its heart the elements of the film that he “gave to it from [his own] heart”.
Accepting the honorary plaque on behalf of Vossoughi was the film’s director Bahman Ghobadi. In his brief speech, he said how happy he was to be returning to the Thessaloniki Film Festival 12 years after his last visit, when he presented his first feature film A Time for Drunken Horses. In the meantime, and following the release of his film No One Knows About Persian Cats, the director was forced to leave Iran and, after moving first to Paris and then Berlin, he finally took residence in Istanbul. “The pain of uprooting and relocation is like a slow poison eating you inside. I felt as if I had become devoid of any hint of life. Like Behrouz Vossoughi himself, who had dedicated his life to the cinema, but was unable to appear in a single film for 30 years; or like the hero of the movie, the poet Sahel, who spent three decades in prison.I also felt like a prisoner. I wanted Rhino Season to express the loneliness I felt. I followed the rhythm of the poems. My film is about all kinds and forms of imprisonment. It forced me to look captivity and death in the eye, and in the end I was born again” .
Bahman Ghobadi dedicated the screening to the late Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, saying he was “the first director, at least as far as I know, who used Kurdish speaking actors in his movies. This was the first time I heard my mother tongue been spoken on the big screen. This made me believe that as a Kurd I was not a second class human being, that my voice can be heard and make a difference. Theo Angelopoulos was the one who gave me the hope and energy to become a filmmaker”.
