The 37th Fajr Film Festival has premiered director Narges Abyar’s latest drama “The Night When the Moon Was Full” about a true love story of Abdul-Hamid Rigi, a member of the Jundallah terrorist group. The film tells the story of Abdul-Hamid Rigi, the younger brother of Abdul-Malik Rigi, the founder and leader of the Jundallah […]
The 37th Fajr Film Festival has premiered director Narges Abyar’s latest drama “The Night When the Moon Was Full” about a true love story of Abdul-Hamid Rigi, a member of the Jundallah terrorist group.
The film tells the story of Abdul-Hamid Rigi, the younger brother of Abdul-Malik Rigi, the founder and leader of the Jundallah terrorist group in southeastern Iran, who marries Faezeh Mansuri, a woman from Tehran.
He forces Faezeh to leave her homeland along with her brother to live in Pakistan where they find themselves involved in the Jundallah terrorist activities.
The Rigi brothers were arrested by Iranian security forces and were executed in 2010 after a court found them guilty of dozens of criminal charges.
“The arrest of Abdul-Malik Rigi is not the subject of my film,” Abyar said in a press conference after a screening of her film at the festival on Sunday.
“I intended to look at the religious radicalism through the eyes of leading character of the film and say that even love can be victimized,” she noted and added, “I tried to avoid working conservatively on the film.”
“Since the 9/11 terror attacks, we have seen the religious radicalism has been developed particularly in our region and I made the film to feature the suffering the people have seen in the Sistan-Baluchestan region.”
Abyar met members of the Rigi ethnic group on her travels in the region to collect information about the Rigi brothers.
“Abdul-Malik was just a member of the Rigi ethnic group, which have a background in the fight against colonialism in the region,” she said.
“They wanted a film made to differentiate them from the Rigi brothers,” added Abyar who called the Rigi ethnic group a respectable tribe.
