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PRODUCTION Germany

Ali Soozandeh’s Tehran Taboo enters production

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- In his animated drama, the German-Iranian filmmaker paints a dark picture of the metropolis, a city of prohibitions, draconian dogmas and restrictive laws

Ali Soozandeh’s Tehran Taboo enters production
Ali Soozandeh, Bilal Yazar and Elmira Rafizadeh on the set of Tehran Taboo

For his ambitious debut feature film, Tehran Taboo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ali Soozandeh
film profile
]
, North Rhine-Westphalia-based German-Iranian filmmaker Ali Soozandeh is combining some innovative stylistic devices from animation and graphic novels. Shot entirely in a green-screen studio in Vienna with real actors, the authentic social drama will feature animated characters who take a close look behind the moral curtain of the Iranian theocracy. For this animated movie, Cologne-based CGI and animation studio Pixeltruck developed new animation techniques in order to blend real and animated actors with 3D animation and drawings made by hand.

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A single mother lives with her five-year-old, mute son in a high-rise area in the middle of the metropolis. In order to pay her rent and for the divorce from her jailed husband, she works as a prostitute but pretends to be a nurse on a night shift. She shares her secret with her pregnant neighbour, a bored housewife, who takes care of her son but also hopes to find a way out of her everyday life. A young music student also lives in the same neighbourhood but gets into trouble after a one-night stand with an 18-year-old virgin.

Tehran Taboo is the first feature-film project by Cologne-based production company Little Dream Entertainment. The German-Austrian co-production is staged in partnership with Vienna-based coop 99, ZDF/Arte and ORF. It is supported by the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, the Austrian Film Institute, the German Federal Film Fund, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, the Vienna Film Fund, FISA and the Hessische Filmförderung. In Germany, Tehran Taboo will be released theatrically by Camino Film.

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