fasikul.altyazi.net/in-english/mania-akbari-tells-her-own-story/Mania claims that the footage from 10 was a personal project. When Mania shot the rushes, she wasn’t planning to produce a film from them. These rushes, which were edited to become 10, were personal recordings of her and her surroundings. She had hours of footage, which Kiarostami discovered and said he wanted to develop into a script. However, Kiarostami ended up never writing a script; he just edited the existing footage. She says, “At the end of 10, you see that he didn’t add credits for its director, writer, or actors. He just wrote our names, Abbas Kiarostami and Mania Akbari.”
However, shortly before the screening in Cannes, things changed.
“He told me, ‘You know Mania, this film is fiction.’ I was shocked, because I never had this feeling about the film. He told me ‘Just follow me, repeat everything I say.’ He told me that the film would never have been selected for Cannes and win a prize if we didn’t say it was a fiction that he had directed it. He convinced me to say that we were actors in the film, and this is how he sold the film to the world. This was his way to gain prestige and commercial success.”
In the press conference, when Mania received the first question, which was about acting, she was shocked and couldn’t answer. She relates how, as she was trying to reply with an abstract answer Kiarostami took the microphone to assert that the film was fiction, and that he started to explain how he had given directions to the actors.
