Alternative Streams in the Cinema of the World & Iran (Case Study: Ammar Film Festival)

This article surveys on alternative cinema in the world and Iranian cinema with a case study on the screened films at Ammar Film Festival. Initially, three movements of alternative cinema in film history are inspected in brief: the Independent cinema of United State, Avant-Garde Cinema in France and the Third Cinema of Argentina. The conditions that led to the emergence of each movement such as political, social, economical & cultural/aesthetic are explored to find out if there are any relations between them and alternative streams of Iranian cinema after Islamic Revolution. The theoretical framework of this article is based on Critical Theory of Frankfurt School, which enables a combination of socio-economical and textual analysis of artworks with a trans disciplinary (social-ideological) approach in a critical context. Besides, the descriptive and comparative analysis, a series of deep interviews with filmmakers, academics, journalists and experts of the field and participatory observation in workshops of alternative cinema and Ammar Film Festival has been done for this study. The reasoning of this article is around the evolutions after Islamic Revolution which led Iranian cinema to become an alternative one in the world contemporary cinema. It is also argued that other alternative/ streams emerged within Iranian cinema that try not only to distinguish themselves from world contemporary cinema but also present a different form of cinema from mainstream Iranian cinema. Ammar Film Festival has been studied in this article as a sample to show the differences between this stream alternative in Iranian cinema and other cinema in the world.