In the most spine-chilling addition to the New Zealand International Film Festival, Under the Shadow screens here for the first time tonight.
Set in war-torn 1980's Tehran, it follows a mother and daughter's struggles after a missile falls on their building and fails to explode, unleashing a malevolent spirit into their apartment.
Shideh (Narges Rashidi) tries to shield her daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) from an evil which she herself isn't sure exists.
Newshub spoke to Under the Shadow’s British- Iranian writer and director Babak Anvari about the making of his first feature-length film.
The film is semi-auto biographic, can you tell me about this?
Obviously it's a work of fiction because its horror/psychological thriller, but a lot of it comes from my memories when I was growing up in Tehran during the 80's. I was a child more or less the same age as the child in the film - the little girl - so it's basically tapping into those memories and heavily dramatising it and fictionalising it.
In the film the characters are fearful of entities they call "djinn". Can you explain to me what they are?
Djinn is a very popular myth across the Middle East, every Middle Eastern country has their own take so it's a known myth. But even across Iran, like south Iran have their own take on it as well as north Iran. It is quite popular in our country. For the international audience, I just thought – every culture has this sort of demonic entity.
I thought as long as the international audience understands that, it's not going to be hard for them to follow the myth in the film.
All the actors in the film speak fluent Farsi, was it difficult to cast them?
One of the main things that I was focused on during casting – I wanted to make sure the cast spoke Farsi fluently. So we looked everywhere around the world for these Farsi-speaking Iranian actors who had immigrated to somewhere else outside Iran. My cast is from the US, the UK, France, Italy, Germany – like really across the world. It took some time, but we did it.
Netflix has picked up Under the Shadow; can you tell me how that happened?
We had our world premiere at Sundance Film Festival and before the festival they came along and bought it, which was great. It created such a buzz around the film and we basically just thought that's great job done, we can basically just enjoy the festival, rather than worrying about distribution.
Netflix's picked up the streaming rights but it's also going to be released theatrically at the end of the year like around October in selected regions.
What's next?
I just started working on my second feature script. It's a thriller but more Hitchcockian rather than psychological and I have a couple of other ideas that I'm working on developing.
Newshub.
