“The Old Bachelor” to premiere in UK at London Breeze Film Festival

The movie is set to be a summer 2024 release and is Baraheni’s second feature film following his acclaimed ‘Bridge of Sleep’ which was released in 2016, ISNA said.

The movie has just been awarded the Best Film Award for the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands the World Cinema Award for the Galway Film Fleadh in Ireland and the Best Actor Award for Hasan Pourshirazi for a towering portrayal of the family head.

Baraheni’s second feature is no less a compelling drama about two middle aged brothers Hamed Behdad and Mohammad Valizadegan who live with an oppressive father Pourshirazi. Rather aggressive and full of anger as well as provoked by chauvinism, the father was abusive so that his second wife left him. Now he turns on his oldest son and the other son dreams of ways he might get rid of his father. When the man find a young woman (Leila Hatami) and takes her to a flat above to have a marriage but the woman starts to attract the elder son this very sick family becomes collapse. 

Savage, yet beautifully filmed for sensitive viewers, this film touches upon such powerful fundamentals as macho culture, hatred towards women, kindness, cruelty, passion, and despair, so it is rather democratic in terms of the themes it explores,

While Baraheni’s first feature film “Bridge of Sleep” borrowed raw material from Dostoevskiy’s “Crime and Punishment,” his second feature quote’s Shakespeare’s family tragedies’ dark soul. 

A blistering attack on ‘patriarchy,’ like the most intensely focused of Iranian filmmaking, the beauty of “The Old Bachelor” is in its ability to be as pointedly universal as it is local, as much a hymn of gender revolt against arbitrarily oppressive systems, anywhere in the world. 

Currently being a film director, writer and producer Baraheni who is 50 years of age is a fine art holder from York University in Toronto Canada. He has several successfully worked short movies besides he made a documentary about his father Reza Baraheni, Iranian poet and writer.

Among the events of the current London Breeze Film Festival are paced gala opening film, industry day, the programme of AR/VR/XR films, short films, UK feature fiction and documentary premieres and previews, Impact Day, Youth and Family Day and awards ceremony.