Screening of Mania Akbari's film "10 + 4", Monday May 5

I love Mania Akbari's work! We screened 20 FINGERS at AFI FEST in 2004
and Mania was able to come to the festival to present her film. There
were lively Q&A's after the screening and it was awesome meeting her.
Her new film is screening at Redcat downtown.

Film at REDCAT concludes its Fifth Season with the West Coast premiere
of Mania Akbari's acclaimed second feature, "10 + 4", Monday May 5

In the wake of the success of PERSEPOLIS, that presented a different,
and distinctly female voice, from Iran, it is all the more important to
hear and see the point of view of another woman from Iran, exposing her
own fight not only with the social structure of her country, but with an
issue that concerns women all over the world: breast cancer.
Mania Akbari is a painter, a video artist, a filmmaker and an actor. As
an actor, she was the main character is Abbas Kiarostami's TEN
(basically appearing in a fictionalized version of herself.) As a
director, she won the Digital Competition in Venice with her first
feature, 20 FINGERS that caustically explores the rift between men and
women in Iranian society. As a video artist, she has produced painterly,
emotionally complex yet visually abstract "Video Arts" pieces (8 in
total).

At Kiarostami's prompting, she directed a sequel to TEN, that
documents, yet fictionalizes, her own fight with breast cancer, using
her body as a vector to bring the spectator in and using mise en scene
to create a language expressing her fight.

FILM AT REDCAT PRESENTS
Mania Akbari
10 + 4 (Dah be alaveh Chahar)
Mon May 5 | 8 pm
Jack H. Skirball Series
$9 [students $7]

West Coast premiere
Iran, 2007, 77 min., Beta SP

This film reflects my inner experience. It is vitally important to
expose deep inner truths no matter how difficult and painful they are.
10 + 4 depicts a part of these realities. What is difficult and can't be
said or heard will be seen and this will make healing possible. We have
to allow the things that must die within us to die; and allow what has
to come to life again or has stayed alive to be. If we do not resist
inner death, then real death will appear in all its strength. – Mania
Akbari