Due to his illness, Fadaian could not attend the honoring ceremony on Friday and his son, Faraz, received the award on behalf of his father.
“My father is not used to talking much about himself. I love his ‘Stone, Mother, Silent’ and I think it is a really powerful film,” Faraz said in his brief speech at the ceremony.
“We usually talk about cinema, and it is about six years that I have been working with him next to his camera, but I cannot understand him much, because he is a very complex person,” he said.
“He travels a lot. He suddenly picks up his camera and goes on a journey. We went on a journey before the outbreak of the coronavirus and he began to film the region and the people there,” he added.
“His main characteristics are that he lives with his work. After the spread of coronavirus, I asked him to come and live with me. The very first two months were very hard for him, but later we began to walk every night, and after a while I asked him to a make documentary about these quarantine days and he made ‘Sketches of Living in Quarantine’” he said.
“Sketches of Living in Quarantine” gives an account of what happened over the five months after the first COVID-19 cases were detected in Iran. The film was reviewed in a special program during the festival.
Due to the pandemic, this year’s Cinéma Vérité is being held entirely online, and the programs are available on Filimo, TVA and Hashure, the Iranian platforms providing video on demand (VOD) service for films.
Every day, several films are being introduced during the event, while a number of top Iranian and international documentarians and critics are holding online workshops and panel discussions.
The Documentary and Experimental Film Center (DEFC) is the main organizer of the event.
The festival will be running online until December 22.