Sanaz Fotouhi
Iiran – Australia
Love Marriage in Kabul
The Macau Literary Festival will welcome Sanaz Fotouhi, an Iranian-Australian author and General Manager of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). She co-produced the documentary Love Marriage in Kabul and has worked on documentaries in Iran and Afghanistan including the award-winning Hidden Generation: Story of women self-immolation in Afghanistan. She has also published The Literature of the Iranian Diaspora: Meaning and Identity since the Islamic Revolution.
Love Marriage in Kabul
Mahboba Rawi, an Afghan-Australian woman and the founder of Mahboba’s Promise has dedicated her life to helping orphans and widows and schooling girls in Afghanistan. Abdul, one of these orphans, is in love with Fatemeh, the girl next door. The two have been exchanging romantic letters for over a year and hope to marry one day. However, Fatemeh’s father has decided to marry her with anyone who can offer a large sum of money as her dowry. That’s when Mahboba decides to intervene to make the marriage happen between them. However, Fatemeh’s father demands an impossible dowry request. With nothing to Abdul’s name, the fate of the couple depends entirely on Mahboba’s ability to meet or negotiate the father’s terms. But she only has one month and limited resources.
Clara Law
Macau – Australia
The Goddess of 1967
Letters to Ali
Filmmaker Clara Law was born in Macau and has lived in Australia since the 1990s. She is now back to her hometown to show some of her works at the Macau Literary Festival. The creator of films such as Autumn Moon, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 1992; and Temptations of a Monk (1993), Floating Life (1996) and The Goddess of 1967 (2000), all praised and awarded on the international circuit, Clara Law also directed the documentary Letters to Ali (2004), the story of an Afghan boy seeking asylum in Australia. Almost 50 years after leaving Macau, Clara Law was recently back in town, shooting her new film, Drifting Petals, partially set here.
The Goddess of 1967
JM dreams of owning the legendary DS model from Citroën and so he contacts a potential seller and flies to Australia to close the deal. His contact doesn’t show up at the airport so he visits him at his house, only to find him and his wife dead. BG, a young blind girl is at the scene guarding a small child and tells him the dead man is not the owner of the car, but she can take him to the real owner. JM agrees and together they embark on a journey that will take them deep into the Australian outback.
Letters to Ali
Letters to Ali tells the story of an Australian family who starts to correspond with an Afghan boy seeking asylum in Australia. The boy is detained at Port Hedland unaccompanied by any relatives. The correspondence becomes a quest by the Australian family to visit Ali and take up his case for a visa. Clara Law follows the family on their journey across the continent through the deserts, from Melbourne in the southeast to Port Hedland in the northwest. The documentary also includes interviews with an activist, an ex-Immigration Minister and an ex-Prime Minister.
