‘Holy Spider’ Star Zar Amir Ebrahimi Heads Competition Jury at Goteborg Film Festival

Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of Ali Abbasi’s Oscar contender Holy Spider, will head up the Nordic competition jury at this year’s Goteborg Film Festival.

Ebrahimi, riding high following her star-making performance in Holy Spider, which won her the best actress honor in Cannes last year, will oversee the main competition section at Goteborg, Sweden’s leading film fest.

She’s joined on the 2023 Goteborg jury by Danish actress Sofie Grabol (The Killing), Ukrainian director Antonio Lukich (Luxembourg, Luxembourg) and Swedish film composer Matti Bye (The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared). The jury will pick the best films from this year’s festival from the Nordic regions. The nine films in the 2023 Nordic Competition lineup will be announced Jan. 10.

In Holy Spider, Ebrahimi plays an Iranian journalist trying to find a serial killer who has been targeting sex workers in Iran’s holy city of Mashhad. The film, inspired by real-life events in Iran in the early 2000s, is Denmark’s contender for the best international feature Oscar (director Abbasi is Danish-Iranian) and has recently made the shortlist for the 95th Academy Awards.

Ebrahimi was forced to flee Iran for France in 2008 and has been an outspoken critic of the Tehran regime and a strong supporter of recent anti-government protests. In Goteborg, she plans to stage a demonstration of support for Iranian actress Taraneh Alidoosti, who was only recently released on bail after being detained by authorities for voicing her support of protestors on social media.

Goteborg will also screen Alidoosti’s latest feature, Mani Haghighi’s doppelgänger thriller Subtraction, in its Swedish premiere.

Iranian cinema will be in focus at this year’s festival, with additional screenings of No Bears, the latest from imprisoned director Jafar Panahi, and How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish, a Mania Akbari documentary about the liberation, exploitation and oppression of Iran’s women, which premiered at the Tallinn Film Festival in November.