Richmond Hill
December 04, 2008 10:47 PM
Sydney Vega
“I saw pretty much all the films here. And I saw a lot of naked souls. And ... once you present yourself to the world in the nude, you go beyond any concept of a win, or loss.”
This was Pedram Goshtasbpour’s speech at the 50th Zinebi International Film Festival, which took place in Spain last week. “Vivre Basque” is how the Richmond Hill man ended his acceptance of the award, before the applause.
“Basque culture is an effortless matriarchy, like London or Quebec, or Azari folk,” said Mr. Goshtasbpour, as we munched down pintxos – which are like psychedelic sushi of all kinds sold at every bar -- in the intimate passageways of Bilbao’s Casco Viejo.
Bilbao is a city in northern Spain known for its rain, its Basque autonomy, industry and the Guggenheim franchise; not too long ago the government decided to transform this Hamilton-esque town into a tourist-seducing mecca.
So a grassroots festival resulted and Mr. Goshtasbpour’s five-minute short film, Eleven Roses, was one of 80 films selected out of 2,849 films submitted.
Eleven Roses depicts a love triangle between a modern lady and two Vaudevillian men of opposing weight and charm and is considered one of the shortest films to compress and include all the classic Greek tragedy elements into its word-free narrative.
The film’s writer/director, Pedram Goshtasbpour, who also produced the film as a Canada/Hong Kong co-production, was born in Tehran in 1975 and has lived in Richmond Hill since 1991.
“The Hill is always with me. Good people; albeit measured.”
I asked him what he meant, as we swilled our second Krušovice beer (the best beer in the world made by this vivacious matron who mixes just a tad of dark ale into her rendition).
“Look around man ... intimacy is more immediate here, spontaneous, you can have deft laughs and dialogs about nothing without people wondering what and who you want out of it all.”
Mr. Goshtasbpour chomped a raw fish and cheese-themed pintxo and continued, “You can hear more footsteps and chatter because of all the tight and thin alleys. Richmond Hill, and most of NA [North America] are towns constructed after the advent of autos so people are more inwards, modular, less immediately intimate.”
The social-centric theme of E1even Roses deals with the Black October of 1929 and the great Wall Street crash which paralyzed the US economy through the ensuing Great Depression, vis-à-vis Trevor: an emasculated and bullied small-town citizen of a budding metropolitan society -- a sweetheart turned slapdash terrorist.
“Our post-modern culture – this I-I-I age, belies with it super-self-privatized individuals. But everything has a piercing corollary usually in contradiction to its idealized, popular benefits. We see a lot of hard-done-by solitaires going nuts with the gun. No?”
Eleven Roses has recently been aired for audiences at Cannes, France and Palm Springs, California and has won two awards – an Audience Award at Filmstock in the UK, and a Best Short Animated Film from the renowned Moving Pictures Magazine.
But Eleven Roses didn’t win at Zinebi, Spain, and Mr. Goshtasbpour’s speech, which he delivered to a full audience in a Teatro Arriaga Antzokia (grand rococo opera house a la the movie Amadeus) last Saturday, was for another Canadian short film called Ghosts and Gravel Roads by an absent Mike Rollo, which won the Best Documentary award.
“Whether you win, or lose, you always move on – bottom line.”
Sydney Vega is a Richmond Hill writer, working on his first novel.