Houman Seyyedi belongs to the generation of Iranian filmmakers who got their start in the early 2000’s, in his case working as an actor in Asghar Farhadi’s seminal film Fireworks Wednesday. A versatile filmmaker with an understanding of the medium’s rules and how to break them, Seyyedi has successfully continued parallel careers as an actor and director, screenwriter and editor.
As a director he got immediately noticed with his visually striking and thematically transgressive early feature 13, the story of a morose 13-year-old boy who falls in with a gang of pushers. Seyyedi turns this material into a gripping, modern story that won the Audience Award when it bowed at Iran’s Fajr Film Festival.
Confessions of My Dangerous Mind (about a man who loses his memory) and especially the outrageous 2018 film Sheeple consolidated his importance as a leading new director. Sheeple told the zany, down-and-dirty tale of a family crisis that undoes a gang of drug dealers who take in orphans from the street. The cast is headed by then-rising star Navid Mohammadzadeh as the loopy younger brother with delusions of grandeur, who Seyyedi spotted early on and cast in his previous films 13 and Sound and Fury.
None of these off-beat audience pleasers, however, made waves like his sixth feature World War III. Bowing at Venice this year in the Horizons section, it won two major awards: best film and best actor for its star Mohsen Tanabandeh. And it has been selected as Iran’s official entry into the Academy’s International Feature Competition. In many ways it is a very different film from the others, reflecting its dark atmosphere that seems to envelope every character. Certainly the story of a poor day laborer on a film set who gets a role playing Hitler, all the while trying to hide his lover on the set, is paradoxical enough and contains Seyyedi’s violent trademark plot twists that you can’t see coming. Though written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has the prophetic quality of a nightmare that repeats itself, in different places and times in history.
