Qashqai musician biopic warmly received at Moscow festival

The prestigious film “Amin”, which went on screen on June 25 and 28 at the Russian Trace section of the festival, won strong applauses of audiences after screening.

Directed by Shahin Parhami, the film is about a musician named Amin Aqaii from Qashqai nomads of the Fars province who has dedicated his life to preserving, documenting and teaching the unique musical tradition of his people, the Qashqai, a tradition on the verge of extinction.

His family is selling their meager belongings to help support their son’s education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky’s Conservatory in Kiev, Ukraine, but that is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.

The Program Director of the Moscow International Film Festival Kirill Razlogov called the realistic scenes and magnificent scenery of “Amin” as main factors for choosing the film for the Russian Trace section.

One of the main settings of the film was Tchaikovsky’s Conservatory in Kiev which had a great impact on the organizer of the festival, he mentioned.

“This is my second film about Persian music that originates from original Persian culture and I plan to make more films on Iranian artistic figures and art,” Parhami told the Persian service of IRNA.

Parhami said that he came across adolescent Amin several years ago but they began shooting the film when Amin was studying at Kiev.

The film is filled with the natural scenery from the landscape of southern Iran as well as the traditions and rituals of Qashqai people, he said.

The renowned Qashqai musician Mohammadhossein Kiani died in 2009 and left a precious collection of Qashqai music’s maqams (maqams or maqamat are sets of musical scales and characteristic melodic elements, or motives, and traditional patterns for their use, forming a system for the melodic and tonal development of performances in Islamic music) for his young friend Amin who visited the master every summer.

“Making the film ‘Amin’ was an extremely difficult task since I wanted everything to be natural and the result is fantastic and film’s scenes are brilliant,” he mentioned.

A joint production of Iran, Canada, South Korea and Ukraine, the film went on screen at the festival which will run until July 2.

SB/YAW
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MNA