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Facepalm
Production Country (s) Iran Production Company (s) Dissolve Film studio
Genre Drama / Sport Production Spec 4K / Color / 100 min
Production Stage
(or Project Status)		 In Development Expected Date of Completion June 2022
Total Budget
(Negative Cost)		 300,000 USD Confirmed Financing 10,000 USD
(Production house investment)
Fellow Name Pourya MORADI
Director Pourya MORADI Email of Director pouryac@gmail.com
Producer (s) Pourya MORADI Email of Producer (s) pouryac@gmail.com
Profile of the Producer (s) Pourya Moradi graduated with a master’s degree of cinema from the University of Tehran in 2014. He started to make short films since college. Till now he has made six short films, which have been screened in various film festivals, and edited many shorts and documentaries. He also collaborated with many art galleries’ visual artists in order to make video-art and experimental short films. He is an alumnus of Bucheon Fantastic Film School 2018 and a 2019 fellow at the International Film Business Academy at Busan Asian Film School (AFiS). Facepalm is his debut feature.
Logline After a traumatic accident, a strong yet modest wrestler quits wrestling and struggles to save himself from ruination. When he finds out that he has been used as bait by a coach, he comes back to wrestling looking for redemption.
Synopsis ALI (21) is a strong yet modest wrestler who right in the culmination of youth and rapture is being dragged to the heart of darkness by a traumatic accident. Uncaring about everything around him, he gets on with illegal jobs to survive along with his crippled father, living in an old planned town in the south of Tehran. Ali’s best friend SAEED (22) trains in order to wrestle in an important competition. Ali gets to know an old wrestling heavy hitter, SHAHRIARI (47). Shahriari urges Ali to sell athletic performance-enhancing drugs thereby Ali’s economic situation improves. But everything gets destroyed when Ali finds out that he was used as bait for Shahriari to defame Saeed.

Saeed is banned from wrestling for six months thereby he cannot fight in the competition. To compensate for his mistake, Ali decides to wrestle again to prevent Shahriari from reaching his aim. Ali trains intensively and prepares himself well but a strange street fight leads him to injury. Not to lose his chance, he injects an illegal drug to his ankle. Ali’s doping makes his father furious and it causes a quarrel, during which Ali pushes his father away fiercely.

In the competition day, Ali wrestles courageously despite suffering severe pain. He gets through the final stage thus should fight against a wrestler whose coach is Shahriari. In the final fight, however, on the verge of victory Ali reviews things that happened to him in his mind and suddenly decides to quit the fight. After learning about his father’s death, Ali goes back to the site of the original accident and rehabilitates himself.