Thousands of migratory birds fly to Hormuzgan province in fall.

(Photo by Nader Nasseri)

German Award For ‘Final Whistle’

Iranian movie ‘Final Whistle’ has won the Main Award of Germany’s 61st International Film Festival Mannheim Heidelberg that ended on November 18.
According to the festival’s jury panel, humanity was beautifully portrayed in the film, IRNA wrote.
‘Final Whistle’, directed by Niki Karimi, was first screened at Busan International Film Festival in South Korea.
It was also awarded three prizes at the Vesoul International Film Festival in France.

Seraj Concert Due

Arts & Culture Desk

Noted Iranian vocalist Hessameddin Seraj will perform a concert in December.
The performance is scheduled for 27-8, during the lunar month of Safar. It will be held at Milad Tower’s auditorium.
Titled ‘Farewell’, the performance aims to promote the culture of Ashura.
Ashura is the tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar which marks the martyrdom of Imam Hussein (AS), the third Shiite Imam, and his companions in the plains of Karbala in Iraq.

City Theater Plans Ta’zieh

Arts & Culture Desk

Ten Ta’zieh performances will be held in Tehran’s City Theater Complex.
The performances mark the mourning month of Muharram that began November 16. These aim to help promote the art of Ta’zieh, public relations office of the Performing Arts Center said.
The performances will be held in the City Theater open area every night after the call to the evening prayer from November 20-29.
‘Hazrat Ali Akbar’, ‘Hazrat Qassem’, ‘Imam Hussein’ and ‘Hazrat Abbas’ are among the performances.
Ta’zieh means depicting and visualizing the agonizing martyrdom of Imam Hussein (AS), the third Shiite Imam.
Ta’zieh has deep roots in Iran. Deilamian, who were Iranian and Shiite rulers, visualized and acted the oppressions of the caliphs and the painful story of Karbala.
Ashura is the tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar which marks the martyrdom of Imam Hussein (AS) and his companions in the plains of Karbala in Iraq.

‘Growing in the Wind’ to Vie In Spanish Festival

Iranian director Rahbar Qanbari’s ‘Growing in the Wind is in the lineup of the Spanish Gijon International Film Festival.
It will be shown in the competition section of the festival. Produced by Iran’s Farabi Cinematic Foundation, the 84-minute movie recounts the story of a teenager and the problems he and his family deal with in their migration process.
The movie was recently presented at the Cinekid Film Festival in the Netherlands in October, according to Mehr News Agency.
Qanbari’s ‘Little Bird’ earned him the Special International Jury Prize of the 14th Cairo International Film Festival for Children.
He also won the Best Feature Film Award of the 9th Religion Today Film Festival in Italy for his 2004 production, ‘He’.

San Francisco Museums, Louvre Announce Major Accord

Officials from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Musée du Louvre announced an exclusive agreement in which the two institutions will collaborate on a series of exhibitions and exchanges.
The agreement will include plans to share significant works of art from both museums’ collections with audiences in San Francisco and Paris during the next five years, ArtDaily said.
The international accord, signed amid much fanfare Monday before the opening of the new exhibition ‘Royal Treasures from the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette at the Legion of Honor’, marks a unique partnership between the two museums that will include collaborations on publications, art conservation projects, and public education programs.
Under terms of the agreement, the Louvre and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which comprises the Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum, will work together to identify art works to be made available for short- or long-term loans from their respective collections.
The loans and exhibitions “would take the form of antiquities, paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and textiles,’’ says the accord. Curators at both museums said that while specific works of art were still being discussed, the loans may include whole exhibitions or single objects that could augment parts of their permanent collections.

Paris Holds Dalí Retrospective

Paris’s reputation for blockbuster art shows--where hordes of diehard visitors will queue all night in the rain to get in--will be confirmed again this week as the Pompidou Center opens the biggest Salvador Dalí retrospective in more than 30 years.
It is the largest show of his works since his 1979 Paris retrospective, which remains the most viewed show in the Pompidou’s history--with almost 900,000 visitors, a rate of about 8,000 a day, Guardian.co.uk reported.
That show was presided over by Dalí himself, who, with typical immodesty, demanded of curators: “It must be something enormous, colossal, a sort of living apotheosis that makes everyone understand that I am inimitable.”
Since the start of the financial crisis, the French capital has repeatedly shown that international economic gloom has not diminished the public’s demand for big art exhibitions.
In 2010, the world’s biggest Monet retrospective, at the Grand Palais, attracted 920,000 visitors and had to open all night to accommodate the crowds. France had not seen such desperate queues since 1.2 million turned out to see the treasures of Tutankhamun in 1967.
Another vast Grand Palais exhibition, Picasso and the Masters, was a sellout in 2008. The Dalí show, tipped as one of Paris’s biggest arts events of the winter. The theater-museum in Figueres, Catalonia, the town where Dali was born, has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Spain.
The Paris show, which will run until March before transferring to Madrid, will feature about 200 works, including oils, sculptures, films and installations, designed to show the inner workings of the artist and provocateur who was lampooned for his political stances and the money he made from his art, and once quipped: “The only difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist.”

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH):

Get rid of your fault before finding fault with others.