Three Persian-language movies are vying for best foreign feature for the first time in Oscar history. Ali Abbasi, an Iranian-born Danish resident, has entered the serial killer drama Holy Spider from Iran alongside Iran’s official entry, Houman Seyyedi’s darkly humorous World War III. The film Winners, directed by another Iranian immigrant living in Scotland named Hassan Nazer and about (of all things) a missing Oscar statue, is where Britain’s hopes are now placed.
The three films collectively illustrate the diversity of Iranian cinema, both domestically and internationally.
Winners is Nazer’s love letter to the filmmakers of his nation. It is filled with allusions to and lines from other Farsi movies, like Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven, and The Song of Sparrows. It is dedicated to Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, Majid Majidi, and Jafar Panahi (the star of the latter two movies, Mohammad Amir Naji, has a prominent meta role in Winners). The narrative, which centres on two impoverished rural youngsters who discover an Oscar statue and make fruitless attempts to sell it, gently but occasionally bitingly highlights the contrast between the idyllic world that movies portray and the hard realities of Iranian daily life.
