{"word_count": 396, "character_count": 2582}
Call for chaptersContributions (in English) are now invited for an edited volume on the films of eminent Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Hatamikia. Hatamikia’s cinema is quite unknown to the West and little has been written about his films on Sacred Defense Cinema, beginning in 1980 and completed during the eight year war with Iraq. Hardly distributed in Europe with English subtitles, his films seem to be restricted to film festivals for cinema specialists in Iran rather than mass audiences in the West. Hatamikia’s cinema tackles the Manicheism of life and death and the mourning process. Images of missing husbands, children or brothers and those for whom there is no actual burial haunt the films of Hatamikia, conjuring up leitmotivs such as traumatic absence, anxiety, guilt, nostalgia and exile.The dichotomy of presence and absence through testimony, survival and memory, as well as the representations of war symbols are omnipresent in key films by Hatamikia such as The Scout (1989), The Emigrant (1990) From Karkheh to the Rhine (1993), Scent of Yusef’s Shirt (1996), The Glass Agency (1998), The Red Ribbon (1999), Low Heights (2002), In Purple (2004) and In the Name of the Father (2005), Green Ring (2007).Being both poetic and aesthetic, Hatamikia’s war films offer a unique reflection on Iranian Sacred Defense Culture and a particular part of history of contemporary Iran, but are also animated with a more universal sense of loss and trauma which every society experiences whatever their culture.Topics may include but not restricted to:- Hatamikia and school of Illumination cinema (Eshraqi),- Cinema of Hatamikia and its connection to Morteza Avinis’ ideologies of Sacred Defense Cinema,- Cinema of Hatamikia and antiwar films,- Social representations in Hatamikia’s films,- Hatamikia, Ideals and ideologies of Iranian Sacred Defense Cinema,- Trauma, loss, presence/ absence,- War nostalgia and exile,- Living with the past: writing the mourning process,- Visual, literary and cultural symbols,- Language as part of the film aesthetics,- The relation between cinema and theatre performance.Abstracts, in English, of 500 words, should be sent to the Editors: Dr. M.Abecassis(michael.abecassis@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk) and Dr. P. Khosronejad (pk18@st-andrews.ac.uk) by 30 April 2014. Those selected for further consideration will be required to produce their article, of no more than 7000 words, by the end of September 2014. These articles will then undergo a process of peer review, and the volume will be published by Sean Kingston by the end of academic year of 2015.