There is a gap of about 4 years between the first and second editions of the Resistance Film Festival. In other words, after the first edition of the festival was held in 2019, the next edition was held in 2023, which was the final years of the war.

During this period, Hossein Vakhshuri is still the festival secretary, but what attracts more attention is that the festival is slowly taking off. Now the festival also has a selection committee, or review team, which apparently had a different form in the previous edition of the festival.

The selection committee of the second edition of the festival includes Akbar Orei, Mohammad Farahani, a famous painter who rushed to the court of God in 2012, and Jamal Shourjeh. Shourjeh was a young man of 33 at the time, and a year after this edition of the festival, in 2024, he made his first feature film, entitled “Rouzneh,” and today he is one of the country’s leading filmmakers.

Jury:

– Mohammad Reza Eslamloo, who won the Best Short Documentary Film Award for “Abadan, the Oppressed City” in the previous edition of the festival, is now a member of the jury.

– Saeed Hajimiri, who has a background in writing, directing, and producing several feature films, and for example, produced a work called “The Voice of the Unseen” in 2013, which was filmed by Kamal Tabrizi (among other judges of this edition of the festival), and was considered a gateway for Tabrizi’s entry into cinema.

– Kamal Tabrizi (a prominent filmmaker in the country), who before this edition was responsible for the education department of the Islamic Center for Filmmaking Education, and he made his first feature film, “Passage,” a year later, in 2018.

Other festival judges were Akbar Orei, Hossein Haghighi, Mohammad Davari, and Ahmad Garshasbi.

It seems that in this period, Vakhshuri and his team members shifted the weight of the jury towards cinema enthusiasts and filmmakers. Because in the previous period, a large part of this team were people who, although they were activists in the field of culture and art, were not cinema and so-called filmmakers, except for a few cases. But in this period, most of the enthusiasts and filmmakers sat on the judging chairs and benches.

*The winners of this period of the festival:

There seems to have been a difference in the way the awards were presented to the winners. The titles of the awards that were supposed to be awarded to their owners were not “Memorial Plaque” and “Diploma of Honor”, but instead of “Memorial Plaque”, the award for the best in each section was presented to the winner. Which brought this festival closer to becoming a festival in the true sense of the word and becoming more professional.

-Best Short Documentary: “The Army, the People and Karbala” from the Fatah Narrative Collection.

This documentary is the sixth part of the third collection of works on the narrative of victory. “The Army, the People and Karbala” begins and ends with the melodies of Sadegh Ahangaran, and the voice of thirty martyrs of the writer “Seyed Morteza Avini” adorns the middle of this work.

This documentary focuses on a specific part of the war and deals with the naval forces and divers, the air forces and pilots, the ground forces and fighters, the support forces and workers, the people and volunteers, together and integrated. “The Army, the People and Karbala” well depicts that victory in war is not confined to a specific individual, individuals or group, but is in the hands of the unity of the entire nation. A documentary that begins with images of warriors and war and ends with urban and popular sequences and plans, the philosophy behind which is clear with a little reflection.

-Best Feature Documentary: “Life in the Heights” by Azizollah Hamidnejad

A film made during the war in the inaccessible heights of Iraqi Kurdistan. This film takes a poetic look at the confrontation between man and nature in the geography of war, looking at human relationships in difficult conditions that are the only guarantee of the survival of simple soldiers in the heart of the icy mountains. This documentary was also screened at the 5th Fajr Film Festival and received the Golden Tablet Award for Best Documentary.

-Best Feature Fiction: “Flight at Night” by Rasoul Malaqlipour/produced in 1986

Flight at Night was a film with the theme of sacred defense that tells the story of a battalion of Iranian forces that is surrounded by the enemy army and its connection with the central headquarters is cut off. Four soldiers from the battalion are selected to reach the headquarters to ask for help. Three of them are martyred and one makes it to the headquarters. The battalion commander also breaks the enemy’s siege to provide drinking water for the wounded soldiers, but is martyred. Auxiliary forces arrive and, after confronting the enemy, rescues the rest of the battalion. In this film, scenes from the Iran-Iraq war and scenes from Ashura are intertwined.

The late Malaqlipour also won the Golden Tablet for Best Film for this work, and “Ali Rastegar” won the Golden Tablet for Best Special Effects at the 5th Fajr Film Festival.

-Best Director: Javad Shamqadri for “Karbala 5”

Shamqadri is the same person who was the Deputy Minister of Cinema Affairs of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the 10th government.

-Best Special Effects: Ali Rastegar for the films “Flight at Night” and “The Epic of the Schiller Valley”

The Epic of the Schiller Valley is a film directed by Ahmad Hassani Moghaddam and written by Seyyed Majid Emami, produced in 1986, and tells the story of a man named “Rahim” who was dismissed from the IRGC. This film did not remain in the memory of the Sacred Defense Cinema.

-Best Sound Recording: “Reza” from the Fatah Narrative Series

“Reza” is the third episode of the third series of Fatah Narrative Series and is the same episode in which Avini’s famous sentence appears: If the Night of Power is the night in which the fate of the world is determined, then all the nights of the front are the Night of Power, and this is where the future history of the Earth is determined.

-Best Cinematography: “The Fourth Day’s Journey” from the Fatah Narrative Series

“The Fourth Day’s Journey” is the second episode of the first series of Fatah Narrative Series