One merit of poetry few persons will deny: It says more and in fewer words than prose.
 

Arts & Culture Desk

For the first time in the last 50 years, archeologists have discovered an accounting tablet which dates back to the Elamite Era in Shahr-e Sukhteh (Burnt City), an ancient archaeological site located 60km from Zabol, the capital of the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, the head of the excavation team said.
The discovery was made during the 19th phase of excavations in the Iranian southern city which began on November 22, IRNA reported.
Seyyed Mansour Sajjadi added that the discovery of such tablets is an ordinary thing in the western parts of Iran, but in the foremost eastern part, it is completely new.
Archaeologist Hossein Moradi found the tablet at a depth of four meters in Room 27 of the residential area of the Burnt City.
“This tablet is 11 cm long, seven cm wide, and has two types of symbols. One symbol is the lines that point to the type of goods sent along with the tablet, and the other is a series of deep rectangular shapes indicating the number of transported goods which are currently unknown to us,” Seyyed Sajjadi
explained.
Asking about the reason why this area was not excavated during the previous phases, he responded that we decided to excavate deeper archeological layers in the last two phases.
Dating back 5,000 years, Shahr-e Sukhteh was among the most important urban areas. The ancient site was registered on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2014.
Shahr-e Sukhteh remained under a 20-cm thick layer of ash and dust for around 4,000 years before being discovered. The dry desert climate of the region also helped preserve the remains of this civilization.
During the various phases of excavation, archeologists collected more than two million pieces from rooms of houses which had remained intact under salt.
 

Arts & Culture Desk

The Persian language is one of the most popular subjects among Serbian university students, said the head of the Department of Oriental Studies, University of Belgrade, Ema Miljkovic.
She made the statement during the ceremony held on the 95th anniversary of establishing the department, ISNA wrote.
In 1926, the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Belgrade was launched by Fahim Bayraktrovich, an Orientalist from Austria, who taught Persian literature. It was the oldest Department of Oriental Studies in the Balkans. Later, Turkish and Arabic courses were added and the three pillars of Orientalism were taught there, she said.
Although lack of equipment and instructors stopped the Persian language courses for several years, during the last 10 years students have had the opportunity to select these courses which have become the most popular ones among the Serbian students, she added.
The department is making attempts to have the Persian language as an independent major which could be followed for the B.A., M.A. and Ph.D., she noted.
Iran’s Ambassador to Serbia Rashid Hassanpour said that the Iranian Embassy will fully support the development of Persian language programs at the University of Belgrade in order to strengthen public diplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

Arts & Culture Desk

The 40th edition of Fadjr International Theater Festival will begin in Iran’s central province of Yazd on February 3 and will run through February 15, announced the Performing Arts Center.
The festival will be held under the supervision of Hossein Mosafer-Astaneh, according to ISNA.
The event will begin on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Imam Mohammad Baqer (PBUH), the fifth Imam of Shia Muslims, he said.  
The closing ceremony of the festival will be held on February 15 on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Imam Ali (PBUH), the first Imam of Shia Muslims, at Vahdat Hall in Tehran, Mosafer-Astaneh noted.
Last year, the festival did not have an international competition due to a spike in coronavirus cases around the globe.
A total of 28 plays were selected for the national competition section of the 40th edition of the festival.

 

The 51st edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) will take place online (from January 26 to February 6) for the second consecutive year due to the nationwide lockdown in the Netherlands to curb the rise of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.
Festival organizers are scrambling to contact filmmakers and come up with logistical solutions. A little over a month before IFFR is due to start they are working out how to scale down the program and re-think the strategy for the online edition. The industry program was already taking place as a hybrid event, screendaily.com reported.
The Dutch government announced its latest lockdown on December 19 in response to surging positive COVID test results including 95,000 in the last week alone.
Under the rules now in place, all non-essential shops, as well as cinemas, schools, museums and restaurants must close until at least January 14, 2022. There is no guarantee at this stage that the lockdown won’t be extended beyond that date.
Earlier this month, festival organizers were still planning to go ahead with a physical edition, albeit with all the industry events happening online.
A senior IFFR staff member declined to give a comment at this stage with so many contingency plans still to be put in place.
“Even in case the current restrictions are lifted after January 14, the sheer scale of the festival is no longer compatible with a last-minute transition to an in-person event in Rotterdam,” a statement from the festival added.
IFFR has acknowledged the impact its decision is likely to have both on the filmmaking community and the festival’s audiences.
This is generally one of the best-attended festivals in Europe which, in a normal year, would have around 1,500 screenings and would expect well over 300,000 cinema admissions. IFFR would also normally look to host at least 2,000 industry professionals.

 

The Iranian short film, ‘Like Rainbow,’ written by Behrad Sahebqarani, won the Best Script Award at the third edition of the Asian Film Festival Golden Diamond Awards in the US.
The short film narrates the story of a girl named Ava who is
going to travel to France to participate in a competition. When she applies for her passport, a secret about her life unfolds, ifilmtv.ir
reported.
The festival is a non-profit organization of the film industry that aims to promote outstanding works from around the world.
The third edition in 2021 received 726 films and 38 screenplays from the US, the UK, Canada, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Iran, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other countries.
 

Portugal is known for its love of ceramics, with the colorful tiles creating impressive artworks and embellishing the interior and exterior of churches, palaces, ordinary houses, schools, and even railway stations around the country.
To celebrate Portugal’s ‘Azulejo,’ or the form of Portuguese painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework, the Museu Nacional do Azulejo (MNAz) in Lisbon is now temporarily hosting an exhibition of modern and contemporary ceramics by female artists.
The exhibition will run through June 2022, wrote euronews.com.
Called the ‘Unknown Territories: Women’s Creativity in Portuguese Modern and Contemporary Ceramics (1950-2020),’ the exhibition will bring together pieces from the museum and public and private collections, from tiling to three-dimensional pieces, designed and/or executed by women who have distinguished themselves in this field in the last 70 years.
The display will inaugurate not only the pieces but also the sensitivity and life circumstances of the artists, some kept very much in the shadows as they produced in a time of dictatorship and great gender inequality.
“With this exhibition, we intend to show the role of women in contemporary Portuguese ceramics. It is very loosely known, there are two or three known names but we wanted to show that it is a much larger universe,” revealed Alexandre Pais, director of the National Tile Museum (MNAz).
The exhibition includes works by Maria Keil, Vieira da Silva, Graça Morais, and Joana Vasconcelos, among other artists working on tiling and ceramics.
The work developed by these women “is in the shadow of the male masters and companions who collaborated with them, or is simply relegated to the secondary level”, indicates a text on the framework of the exhibition.
“Even today, although on a smaller scale, there is an appreciation of projects designed by male artists, despite the growing influence and recognition of the work carried out by women,” it followed.
The objective of this exhibition and of the team assembled by the museum for this project is to change this situation, “to give visibility and importance to a devalued and forgotten heritage, but which is known to be important, of quality and of unsuspected extent”.
The project came within the framework of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, within the framework of one of its main vectors, “valuing women artists, gender equality”, originally due to take place in the summer, but postponed to December due to the pandemic.
All pieces are displayed in the corridors of the old Madre de Deus Convent, and although seven decades in the history of ceramics may seem short, these were particularly creative and innovative decades, according to visual artist Catarina Almada Negreiros.
“The panel ‘Presente,’ that has actually already existed for 10 years but had never been exhibited, uses kinetic tile, which is a tile that has this chameleonic side where it is the observer who triggers the images,” she said.
‘Unknown Territories: Women’s Creativity in Portuguese Modern and Contemporary Ceramics (1950-2020)’ will run in Lisbon from December until June 2022.