Bahman Ghobadi’s latest film Rhino Season was a surprise omission from this year’s Cannes programme. Venice could now serve as the launch pad for the acclaimed director’s drama about a couple who are unjustly incarcerated during Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Bellucci plays Minah, the wife of an incarcerated poet Sahel (Behrouz Vossoughi), who emigrates to Istanbul with her two children after serving a ten-year jail sentence and believing her husband to be dead. Yilmaz Erdogan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) plays the couple’s nemesis.

Multi-hyphenate Ghobadi says his latest work is not strictly a political film: “This film is very different to my previous works. It is a poetic film about an artist whose life was interrupted for thirty years when a person he knew used the political situation at the time to throw him and his wife in prison out of  a deeply-seeded obsession and personal vendetta.”

Ghobadi drew inspiration for Rhino Season from the real life events surrounding a Kurdish poet and family friend who disappeared for thirty years. Presumed dead by his friends and relatives, the man was in fact incarcerated in an Iranian prison.

Source: ScreenDaily