Projects > Secret Ballot - Trailer
Secret Ballot - Trailer
Year:2001
Authorship: Alessandro Favaron
SECRET BALLOT is one of the long-feature films included in the Fabrica Cinema collection, the film production unit of Fabrica.
Directed by Babak Payami (Iran-Canada)
Prize: Venice 2001 – Official Competition – Silver Lion Best Director Award
Synopsis:An unsuspecting soldier awakens to discover that he can forget about another uneventful day at his lonely seaside post. It’s election day!
A ballot box is parachuted down as a young woman pulls up to the shore of the remote island. To the soldier’s surprise, she’s actually the government bureaucrat in charge of local voting. The couple get off to a rocky start since the soldier expects election agents to be men.
Whether he wants to or not, the soldier is thrown into an elections adventure that just may put him out of a job. Orders from above force him to accompany the female agent in an army jeep across the island’s dusty desert. The agent literally leaves no stone unturned in her search for ballots. Many a surprise lies along their route, as they find themselves in one absurd situation after another.
So much can happen in a single day, especially when opposites attract. Views can change, hearts can melt. By sunset, a woman’s idealistic notions can come back down to earth. And a lonely man can discover there’s more to voting by secret ballot than he ever imagined.
Fabrica Cinema was created in September 1997 by Marco Müller, actually Director of Venice Film Festival, and co-produced an initial series of four films which "spoke the truth" about the reality in the distant societies where, otherwise, it would have been impossible to develop any film project without the collaboration with a courageous producer: Journey to the Sun by Yesim Ustaoglu (Turkey); Moloch by Alexander Sokurov (Russia); Seventeen Years by Zhang Yuan (China) and Adanggaman by Roger Gnoan M’Bala (Ivory Coast).
From October 1999 Fabrica Cinema has started to produce first and second features of young film directors from “the rest of the world:
Brainstorm by Lais Bodanzky (Brasil); Blackboards by Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran); No man’s land by Danis Tanovic (Bosnia); Secret Ballot by Babak Payami (Iran); Angel on the right by Djamshed Usmonov (Tadjikistan), Mud by Dervis Zaim (Turkey-Cyprus) and Tropical Malady, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand).
Many of these films have won prestigious awards at the most renowned international film festivals, culminating in the 2002 Oscar for Best Foreign Film for No Man’s Land by Bosnian director Danis Tanovic.
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