15
ManiaAkbari, Director - Actress
Mania Akbari was born in 1974 in Tehran, Iran.
The daughter of schoolteachers, she started paint-
ing at a very early age. Later she worked as cin-
ematographer and assistant director on documen-
taries, which reoriented her towards cinema. Her
international breakthrough occurred, however, not
as a result of her work behind the camera but in
front of it. Akbari played a version of herself, to-
gether with her son Amin Maher and her sister
Roya, in Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002 feature
Ten
, se-
lected for competition at that year’s edition of the
Cannes Film Festival. This was followed in 2003
by Crystal, a documentary about a young Kurdish
woman who produces crystal stones from various
parts of her body, including her eyes, her throat and
her vagina.
Her debut as sole director was in 2004 with
20 Fin-
gers
, which she also wrote and starred in. It was
awarded Best Film in the Digital Cinema section
at the Venice Film Festival and was screened - and
won further awards - at more than 40 film festivals
internationally. During the next three years, Akbari
made
Six VideoArt Works,
which not only screened
at numerous film festivals such as Locarno, but
were also exhibited at museums such as Tate Mod-
ern in London.
In 2007, Akbari was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The experience of successfully battling the disease
prompted her to direct and act in her second fiction-
alised documentary,
10+4
, a sequel to Abbas Kia-
rostami’s
Ten
made four years earlier. The new film
was exhibited at numerous festivals such as San Se-
bastián and Cannes, and received numerous awards
including Nantes Special Public Award Best Film
and Best Director at Kerala Film Festival.
Akbari’s meditations on death, war, family, mem-
ory, beauty, relationships and above all, identity,
have formed the bases not only of her filmed work
but also of a series of photo-based exhibitions that
took place between 2007 and 2010 -
This is Mania-
This is not Mania
(2007),
This is not Mania-This
is not Mandana
(2008),
Van Gogh’s Ear
(2008),
Devastation
(2009),
My Family
(2009),
My Guer-
nica
(2009),
To Be Mandana, To Be Not Mandana
(2009),
Happy Marriage, Mania Akbari & Beh-
noud Shojaee
(2010) - andwhich toured around the
world to countries such as Switzerland, Slovenia,
Brazil, Spain, Italy, UK, France, Dubai and the US.
Glocal Images Programme
Stratos
, by Yiannis Economides
Greece, Germany, Cyprus (2014 -137’)
Stratos works by night at a bakery, and by day as
a hired killer. He collects money for Leonidas’ es-
cape, the man who had saved him while he was in
prison.
Love Steaks
, by Jakob Lass
Germany (2013 - 89’)
Clemens works as a masseur, Lara as a cook, but
their clientele is the same - the guests of a luxury
hotel. As sparks begin to fly between the two, his
sensitivity clashes with her more fiery tempera-
ment - opposites attract, but harmony is nowhere
in sight. Although this unbridled film was shot on
the basis of a definitive script, it also employed im-
provisation and real hotel staff.
This is Martin Bonner
, Chad Hartigan
USA (2013 - 83’)
Fifty-something Martin Bonner leaves his old life
behind and relocates to Reno, where he finds work
helping released prisoners transition to life on the
outside, while trying his hand at speed dating and
passing time as a soccer referee. Meanwhile, Travis
Holloway has just been released from prison after
Omar
On my way
