ORIENT EXPRESS: CASA ASIA in BETEVÉ June-Sept 2025

This period goes from June 5th to September 4th

PROGRAMME

Thursday, June 5th, 2025

Iran

Waltz for Three is a psychological drama filled with mystery and tension. The story follows Mahmoud, who returns home after a long absence. His return coincides with a disturbing event: Fakhri, his mother, receives a call from the psychiatric hospital that will change their lives forever. As they try to maintain an appearance of normalcy, a police officer bursts into their home, intent on investigating the family’s past. Gradually, dark family secrets begin to surface, unleashing a series of revelations that will challenge their familial bonds.

Arman Zarrinkoob, born in Tehran (Iran) in 1976, is renowned for creating and producing various Iranian television series, such as Setayesh. After studying Economic Management, Zarrinkoob began his career in the film industry in 1998, is known for being the creator and producer of several Iranian TV series such as Setayesh. After studying Economic Management, Zarrinkoob began his career in filmmaking in 1998, directing short films and doing advertising work. Over time, he established himself as a key figure in the Iranian entertainment industry. His film Accordion received international attention and was nominated for “Best Director” and “Best Actress” at the Urban Film Festival, solidifying his position as an up-and-coming director within Iranian cinema.

Thursday, June 12th, 2025

India

This moving documentary takes an intimate look at the lives of Nepalese migrant workers in Mumbai, showing the social, economic and political context, they face as they struggle to integrate into Indian society during the COVID-19 pandemic. The story focuses on the challenges faced by Hansi, the young protagonist, and his brother-in-law, Dil Bahadur. They are caught in the whirlwind of lockdown, unable to return to Nepal and struggling to find work.

Diwa Shah is an Indian filmmaker trained at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), specializing in documentaries that explore social and political issues. His international debut with Bahadur: The Brave (2023) has been acclaimed at international festivals, as the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Shah seeks to shed light on the struggles of marginalized communities with a simple and truthful narrative.

Thursday, June 19th, 2025

Iran

Ropewalker Memories | Dir: Hamed Rajabi | 114’ | VOSE | Romantic drama

Ropewalker Memories | Dir: Hamed Rajabi | 114’ | VOSE | Romantic Drama

One apartment. Two men: father and son. Against his son’s wishes, the father brings home sex workers. One of them, for the first time, refuses to leave and an unprecedented situation arises. The previously established principles of possession, ownership and consent begin to fade as the three of them live together. When the situation becomes untenable for the woman, she decides to leave, with the need to open to new horizons and seek freedom in dispossession. The absence of the woman becomes unbearable for both father and child.

Hamed Rajabi (Hamedan, Iran, 1982) graduated in Film from the University of Tehran and participated in the 2011 Berlinale Talent Campus. He began his career directing short films and went on to direct his first feature film, A Minor Leap Down (2015), which was selected that same year for the Panorama section of the Berlinale, where he won the FIPRESCI Prize. He has also written the screenplay for two feature films directed by Majid Barzegar: Rainy Seasons (2010) and Parviz (2012), both selected for numerous international festivals. He also wrote the screenplay for Pooya Badkoobeh’s Dressage, which won the 2018 Special Mention Award in the Generation section of the 68th Berlinale. Ropewalker Memories (2023) is his second and last feature film as a director. Since then, he has won various awards and distinctions at several international festivals.

Thursday, June 26th, 2025

China

It is the first LGBTQIA+ film to receive authorization for release in China. The story begins with the first meeting of the protagonists and their subsequent secret relationship. Zhao Jie and Rohmer decide to travel together to Tibet, and along the way, they are involved in an incident that results in the death of a child. Although they are not responsible for what happened, they feel guilty to the point that they cannot stop arguing about it and eventually separate. However, when Zhao Jie discovers that Rohmer has had an accident on a glacier, he sets out to find his friend with the intention of helping him and preventing him from suffering the same fate as the child they could not save.

After graduating from university, Wang Chao worked for five years in the steel industry, although he was always interested in films and literature. In 1991, joined the Beijing Film Academy where he graduated in 1994 and began working as a film critic. This is how he met Chen Kaige after filming Yellow Earth, and he hired him as assistant director between 1995 and 1998 for the filming of Farewell My Concubine and The Emperos and the Assassin. During this time, he wrote several short stories, which inspired scripts for a few films. With Orphan of Anyang, a film he shot without authorisation, he made his directorial debut. This film was selected in 2001, to participate in the Directors’ Fortnight Section of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2004, he made his second film Day and Night and with Luxury Car in 2006 he completed the trilogy about China that he had been working on for more than five years. His fourth and fifth films, Memory of Love (2009) and Fantasy (2014), which was presented in the Un Certain Regard selection at the Cannes Film Festival that same year, despite its discretion, shows narrative maturity on its director’s part. Looking for Rohmer (2018), shows the interest of Wang Chao for the critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer and the Nouvelle Vague, up to the point of making a film about him, although not necessarily biographic. A Woman (2022), until now his latest film was shown in the last edition of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN with great public success, after its screening in San Sebastian, where it was nominated for the Golden Shell.

Thursday, July 4th, 2025

China

It narrates the story of the miner Liu who despite being very close to his master’s family, ends up sleeping with his wife. When he dies in the mine, he is overcome by a sense of guilt and undertakes various actions to deal with it. Wang Chao’s realism is consistent with the narrator’s faithfulness to the memory of events that have shaped Chinese history.

Thursday, July 10th, 2025

Iran

As the title suggests, this film takes us to a small rural village suffering from a demographic challenge. In the past, in the absence of a logical explanation for the lack of births in the town, women were blamed. Intrigued by the mystery, filmmaker Kazem went to the town and made a documentary based on this story, but it never saw the light of day. Two decades later, the true cause of the demographic problem was discovered. In his wisdom and accompanied by his assistant, the director returns to the town with a firm intention: to decrypt the truth and, this time, to change the dignity of women in the construction of history.

Reza Jamali (Arbedil, Iran 1978) is a graduate filmmaker who, after a substantial output of short films presented and awarded at national and international festivals, debuted with his first feature film Old Men Never Die in 2019. His first feature film won the “Spirits of Asia Award” at the Tokyo International Film Festival and was introduced to more international festival screenings and distribution. A Childless Village (2022) is the second film written and directed by the Iranian director.

Thursday, July 17th, 2025

Uzbekistan

In Rehearsal (2023) we meet Orzu, a theater actress who, unable to reconcile her career with caring for her sister with functional diversity, decides to send her to a boarding school for children in similar circumstances. The film employs meta-theatricality through the play Orzu works on, exploring human decadence and spiritual quest. Initially given completely to her role, this experience leads her to a new understanding of art and truth in the world. Inspired, Orzu redirects her life to a humanitarian cause. She finds in the children’s home where her sister resides an ideal place to begin her new mission: to heal the broken hearts of the world.

Khusnora Rozmatova, a film director born in Uzbekistan, has received international recognition by winning the “For Humanism” award at the 19th Kazan International Muslim Film Festival. Uzbek cinema has experienced unprecedented visibility in recent years, not only because of the growth of its film industry, but also because of the international awards it has received. In 2023, Uzbek filmmakers won 15 international awards, highlighting the country’s growing influence on the global film scene.

Thursday, July 24th, 2025

Iran

Trapped in a dim, hopeless world, forty-something-year old Amir lives his dull and routine day-to-day life. He lost his mother a long time ago and only has his father, who is in an asylum. He doesn’t think of anything else – not even his fruitless love to an Afghan girl, Yasna, since adolescence. One day, he hears about Yasna and tries to find some clues to locate her, but his inquiries tell him to keep looking for her.

Born in 1986 in Tabriz, Navid Esmaeili has been actively working as an actor and director in theatre, cinema and in TV productions. Despite his childhood love for theatre and performance, his traditional family always forbade him to pursue his passion. When he was 17, he married Saeedeh Hamidi. Two years later, he decided to enter the world of cinema and go through academia until he, at last, graduated in Directing. Since then, he has worked with Hamidi as producer/production manager of his different projects. In 2021, Esmaeili made his debut feature film, Floor 1.5, which has not yet been shown anywhere. Pakol is his second feature length film.

Thursday, July 31st, 2025

Uzbekistan

Unhappy Groom (2023) explores Turkestan’s past through the history of Uzbekistan at the dawn of the 20th century, during the rule of the Russian Empire. The film highlights the contrast between ancient religious thought and the governmental incompetence of imperialist regimes. Amidst these tensions, two lovers face the difficulties of a life marked by social conventions, heresies and ambiguous traditions. In parallel, the drama of Salih, a salaried actor, is affected by the inability to meet the ambitious demands of Rahima’s family and be able to marry her. This narrative strikingly reflects the parallels with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where despite the lovers’ attempts to remain aloof from social scrutiny, they cannot avoid their toxicity.

Khusnora Ruzmatova, a film director born in Uzbekistan, has received international recognition by winning the “For Humanism” award at the 19th Kazan International Muslim Film Festival. Uzbek cinema has experienced unprecedented visibility in recent years, not only because of the growth of its film industry, but also because of the international awards it has received. In 2023, Uzbek filmmakers won 15 international awards, highlighting the country’s growing influence on the global film scene.

Thursday, August 7th, 2025

Iran

When Yasmin was six, the same age as her son now, her family migrated to Berlin. Now she has to come back to Iran due to her father’s death, but the trip is complicated as her son is autistic. Upon arriving in Iran, Yasmin, who hardly knew her father, is astonished to find about the inheritance he left her. Her short and unwanted accommodation in her father’s hometown, however, will change many of Yasmin’s ideas about the place where she was born and about life and death in general.

Born in 1979 in Mashhad, Behrooz Shoaibi has been active in different fields of cinema. As an actor, he started his career with Ebrahim Hatamikia’s The Glass Agency (1998) and gained critical and public attention with Homayoun Asadian’s Gold & Copper (2010). His TV movies and series include: The Sloe Garden (2005); Wings Of Hapiness (2008); Abandoned (2009); Somewhere Between Staying and Going (2010); and Secluded (2014) With his debut feature film, The Corridor (Shoaibi) won the best first film award from Fajr 2013.

Thursday, August 14th, 2025

Mongolia

A happy and wealthy couple discovers that the husband has stage three cancer. As it was discovered late, there is very little chance that the patient will survive the treatment. The wife totally refuses to give up and does everything in her power to save her husband. However, despite even going abroad in search of other professionals and undergoing surgery, he will not achieve his goal. While he tries to survive by any means necessary, the victim remembers his happy times, his first love, his wife and his family. The word Gergi means wife in a literal translation, but the root and structure of the word mean “One who lights up the home.”

Sengedorj Janchivdorj graduated in film directing from the University of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Among the awards he received it includes the Mongolian Academy Best Director Award in 2016. His latest film, Life, won the Best Feature Award at the Ulaanbaatar International Film Festival in 2018 and premiered at the Ulaanbaatar International Film Festival of Dhaka in 2019.

Thursday, August 21st, 2025

Iran

Before she has time to process the news of her teenage daughter’s troubled behaviour at school, Sarah is confronted with a bigger concern due to her husband’s disappearance. Sometime in the night, after a routine argument, he just got up and left, leaving behind a mystery that falls almost entirely on Sarah to solve. Alongside with one of the neighbours, she begins to search for him. What comes quick into view though is just how dependent she had become on him to survive. The film is a mixture of suspense with social commentary as Sarah simultaneously searches for her husband while struggling to reclaim her and her daughter’s independence.

Born in 1962 in Shiraz, Abbas Rafei is a graduate of Cinematography (from University of Television) and Dramatic Literature. Rafei established his own film production company in 1995, when he made his first feature film, Mina’s secret. In the international scene, he is best known for Butterfly in the wind (presented at Rio, Oslo, Umea, Mannheim, etc. and awarded at Festival D’ Amiens) and Oblivion season. His company, Filmnegaran, has been active in the production of TV Series, fiction films and documentaries and entered cooperation with a number of film production companies in different parts of the world.

Thursday, August 28th, 2025

Uzbekistan

The film narrates the life of the renowned poet Abdulla Oripov, considered both a phenomenon of 20th century Uzbek poetry and a national hero. Oripov wrote and lived according to the dictates of his heart and endured throughout his life the political games of the old regime fighting against the old political system with his poems and odes. The film portrays the suffering of the Uzbek intelligentsia throughout the 20th century until the country’s independence. Finally, it amends the poet’s death in exile, returning him to his people one last time through the screen.

Erkinov Muzaffarkhon is a prominent Uzbek filmmaker, known for his work as a director, screenwriter and producer. His work focuses on historical and social drama, has received both national and international recognition. Muzaffarkhon has been praised for his ability to capture the essence of Uzbek identity. He is especially notable for the productions that deal with the lives of literary and historical figures, as in his latest film Abdulla Oripov (2024).

Thursday, September 4th, 2025

Iran