Award: Best Screenplay Award – presented to the film and its writers (directors Davood Rahmani and Reza Arabshahi) at the 5th edition of the Kobani International Film Festival 2024 (Taha Karimi Edition)

Film Synopsis:

The film transforms a small, dark space into an entire psychological world. For ten-year-old Sina, the closet becomes the only place where he can hide from fear and the harsh judgments surrounding him. After being expelled from class for wearing nail polish, he hides inside the school laboratory closet, only to find himself trapped there after the school closes.

Within this confined space, the film gradually builds an intimate confrontation between the child and his fears, identity, loneliness, and sense of rejection. Through restrained visual language and carefully controlled tension, darkness, silence, and enclosed space become direct extensions of Sina’s emotional state.

The film approaches its subject with remarkable sensitivity and emotional restraint, avoiding direct statements in favor of psychological tension and subtle human details. The result is a deeply human cinematic experience about childhood, isolation, fear of difference, and the emotional violence of social rejection.

About the Directors:

Davood Rahmani is an Iranian director and cinematographer born in 1981. He studied cinematography at the National University of Radio and Television in Iran and began his professional career in 2002, working across directing and visual storytelling.

His work is known for its strong visual construction and psychologically driven imagery, often blending social realism with emotional atmosphere. Throughout his career, he received several awards in directing and cinematography.

Reza Arabshahi, born in 1973, is an Iranian director and writer with a background in dramatic literature. His artistic experience has long been connected to theatre, children’s films, and human-centered storytelling dealing with childhood, identity, and emotional vulnerability.

In The Closet, the two filmmakers create a psychologically intense cinematic experience built on gradual tension and carefully restrained writing. The enclosed setting becomes a central dramatic and visual element within the narrative, while the screenplay itself stands out for its ability to address a sensitive subject through subtle human storytelling and quiet cinematic language, far from directness or rhetorical treatment.

This emotional and psychologically layered writing earned The Closet the Best Screenplay Award at the 5th edition of the Kobani International Film Festival 2024.