Mitra Farahani’s See You Friday, Robinson was awarded the Grand Prix of the 22nd New Horizons International Film Festival (Wrocław, Poland) on 30 July. The film comprises a cinematic and playful dialogue between director and writer Ebrahim Golestan, who is about to turn 100, and 92-year-old master filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. The film world-premiered at Berlinale 2022, as have all of Farahani’s films since 2001.
In giving the award, the jury, comprising the Polish actress Agata Buzek, Mexican director Michel Franco, Romanian director Radu Jude, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid and Austrian director Sandra Wollner, offered up a Jean-Luc Godard quote to explain their motivation.
“Films were invented to look, tell, and study things. They were mainly a scientific tool for seeing life in a different way. To be only spectacular should be 5 or 10 percent of cinema. All the rest should be documentary study in a broad sense, meaning research and essays. (…) Movies were invented to show reality, but they have not been used that way. They have been used to show dancing girls, killers, machine guns, lovers… (…) In fact, my process has always involved going to the side, being marginal, in the margin. A notebook doesn’t exist without margins. The margin is a necessary place.
Mitra Farahani is an artist, filmmaker and producer born in 1975 in Tehran. A graduate of graphics at Azad University, she also studied at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She currently lives and works in Italy and France.
