(Photo by Mohammad Hossein Taqi)

Robat Sharaf Caravansary is located in Sarakhs, Khorasan Razavi province.

French World Music Award For Iranian Artist

The Babel Med Music is to dedicate the 2013 French Music Award to the Iranian musician and vocalist Mohammad Motamedi.
Motamedi will record a CD with ‘Radio France Ocora Records’ the following year, said Motamedi’s program manager Amir Ali Besharati.
Born in 1978, Motamedi performed several well-received concerts in Iran and some other countries.
He held Extemporization concert in theater of Paris, concert in historical Palace of Versailles and concert in Music Conservator Rome-Italy, Press TV said.
Motamedi also participated in International Festival of Sufi Music in Karachi, Pakistan.
Babel Med Music, which celebrates exceptional artists in World Music, is set to honor the best creative artists as well as the best artists in the category ‘talents without borders’ at this year’s program.
The ninth edition of Babel Med Music award ceremony will be held in Marseilles from March 21-23.

Fajr Visual Arts Winners Named

The fifth edition of Fajr International Visual Arts Festival wrapped up during an award ceremony held in Tehran.
Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini along with several cultural officials and a number of prominent artists attended the award ceremony at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall.
Mojtaba Sharifi was selected the best calligrapher, Fahimeh Ramezani Ahvazi the best pottery maker and Afsaneh Moradi the best illustrator, Press TV said.
A number of artists from 45 countries, including cartoonists, photographers and poster designers submitted around 11,500 works to the festival.
Canada, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Brazil, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, France, Jordan and Serbia were among the participating countries.
The entries competed in nine categories including painting, graphic design, calligraphy, pottery, illustration, ceramics, sculpture miniature, and caricature.
The 2013 edition of the festival also presented documentary and portrait films on visual arts.
Eleven Iranian provinces including Tehran, Alborz, Khuzestan, Semnan, Hamedan, Kerman, Lorestan, Golestan and Hormuzgan concurrently hosted the year’s event.
The fifth edition of Fajr International Visual Arts Festival was held from February 2-30.

2 Films Among TRT Nominees

The national Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) Corporation has nominated two Iranian screen productions for its International Documentary Awards.
Reza Razavi’s ‘Seconds of Lead’ and Arash Lahouti’s ‘Trucker and the Fox’ have been selected to vie at the competition.
‘Seconds of Lead’ features the efforts of an Iranian author Narges Abyar on the particular issue of the massacre of demonstrators during the reign of Iran’s last monarch, in 1978.
Lahouti’s ‘Trucker and the Fox’ screens the life of a truck driver who is a documentarian as well and works on wildlife, Press TV reported.
Iranian filmmaker Mohammed-Ali Hashemzehi’s ‘Mokan’ won the Special Prize of Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey at the 2012 edition of the annual TRT.
The 2013 winners are scheduled to be hailed during a ceremony that will be held in Istanbul on May 13.
Established in 1964, TRT has more than 10 television channels as well as over 10 radio channels.
As the national public broadcaster of Turkey, TRT Corporation organized National Documentary Awards in 2009 and then added the international category in 2010.
TRT International Documentary Film Competition aims to support amateur and professional documentary filmmakers, and to contribute to the development and prevalence of the documentary film genre.

Political Reasons BehindArgo’s Oscar

An American peace activist said the Oscar went to ‘Argo’ for political reasons only.
In an exclusive interview with IRNA, Phil Vellito elaborated on the political motivations behind awarding the ‘Argo’.
Referring to the anti-Iranian sentiments of its director, Vellito said ‘Argo’ is explicitly after generating hatred against Iranians.
Referring to the handing over of the award to the film by the US First Lady, he said it was the first time in the history of Oscar that a president or a first lady took part in awarding prizes.
He said just one day before the awards ceremony the US Secretary of State John Kerry, in a quite unprecedented manner, wished success for the movie’s producers which in itself reveals the depth of the political motivations for picking up the film as an Oscar winner.
“Ben Affleck is known for his anti-Iran sentiments which he has repeatedly revealed in his interviews so far,” he said.
Vellito, who is also a journalist, noted that the timing of the award was also significant in that it occurred only two days before the start of the new round of nuclear talks between Iran and 5+1 which adds to the sensitivity of the issue.

Spielberg to Develop Kubrick’s Napoleon

Steven Spielberg is to give life to a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick about Napoleon, which was scrapped by the late film maker in the 1970s.
He told French TV network Canal+ he would make a TV miniseries--not a film-about the life of the French Emperor.
The Lincoln director previously collaborated with Kubrick on 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, BBC wrote.
The science fiction drama was conceived by Kubrick in the 1970s and later written and directed by Spielberg.
Regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Kubrick directed groundbreaking films including 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Dr Strangelove and Eyes Wide Shut, his last film before his death in 1999.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, he was “devoted” to the research involved in the biopic about Napoleon, spending years exploring the French emperor’s life in detail.
A Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit highlighting Kubrick’s work displayed a 1971 draft letter to studio executives, telling them, “It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.”
It also highlighted an offer letter he wrote to Austrian actor Oskar Werner for the title role in the film and a “very polite hand-written inability letter” from Audrey Hepburn, in which she said she had decided not to work for a while, but asked if he would consider her “again sometime”.

Musée d’Orsay Illustrates Dark Romanticism

After opening at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, the exhibition ‘The Angel of the Odd--Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst’ travels to the Musée d’Orsay.
It brings together around 200 works: paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures from the late 18th century to the early 20th century, as well as twelve films from the inter-war period. It was literary critic and art historian Mario Praz who first used the term ‘Dark Romanticism’, thus naming a vast swathe of literature and artistic creation, which from the 1760s onwards exploited the shadows, excesses and irrational elements that lurked behind the apparent triumph of enlightened Reason, ArtDaily said.
Dark Gothic novels first appeared in England at the end of the 18th century and were instantly a great success. Although set in the contemporary world, they were mainly concerned with mystery and heightened emotions that could make the reader shiver with fear as well as pleasure, and explored not only the terror we all have of the unknown, but also our fascination with the sadistic and the grotesque. Painters, engravers and sculptors from all over Europe, London and Paris, Madrid and Dresden, striving to compete with poets, playwrights and novelists, expressed this dark side visually in a multitude of ways, plunging the viewer into a dizzying spectacle of the horrific and the grotesque: Goya and Géricault presented us with the senseless atrocities of war and the superstitions of their time, Fuseli and Delacroix produced their passionate interpretations of the works of Dante, Milton, Shakespeare and Goethe by giving substance to the ghosts, witches and devils in them, whereas C.D. Friedrich and Carl Blechen cast the viewer into enigmatic, gloomy landscapes.

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH):

Paradise is nearer to you than the thongs of your sandals; and the Hell
likewise.