Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, Japan, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and Brazil.

The festival which aims to promote the exploitation of cinematic tools for spreading "truth" and "reality" worldwide while encouraging the young talents to engage in the field of documentary filmmaking lasted for 9 days. 

The auditoriums of International Vahdat Hall, Palestine Theater and Freedom Theater screened nearly 200 documentaries from international filmmakers who gathered in Iran to expose their talent, capability and skills of displaying the "truth" and "reality" through the means of visual techniques and cinematic knowledge.  

The young Indian director Nishtha Jain was the only Asian winner of the festival who succeeded to attract the jury and grab the honorary diploma, Verity statue and 2,000€ award for the best short documentary.

Prior to this, the Mumbai-based independent director Jain had won several international awards for her under 60-minutes documentary "Lakshmi and me" in various festivals such as the 5th Golden Apricot Film Festival of Armenia, Bucharest 2008 International Film Festival, Planete Doc Film Festival of Warsaw and the 2008 International Women's Film Festival of Dortmund.

The impressive film narrates the story of an almost poor and miserable woman who works as a servant for her employer who is also a woman. The women share a relatively friendly communication with one another. But what makes the film so effective and eye-catching is the chain of unrelated and challenging accidents that happen for the "Lakshmi."

The other winner of the international section of the festival was the polish director Marcin Koszalka who was awarded an honorary diploma, Verity statue and 5000€ for the best lengthy documentary.

His delicate film "Existence" drew an eye-catching and in-depth outline of Jerzy Nowak's real life. Nowak is a distinguished 84 year old Polish actor who decided that after death his body should be used for the benefit of science.  This precious documentary follows Mr. Nowak as he makes this most personal and final decision and reveals his own dilemmas and thoughts about death.

The other prize for the best lengthy documentary went to a veteran filmmaker from Switzerland named Fernand Melgar who was born in Morocco with Spanish origin.

The last prize belonged to "Victor Asliuk" for the political documentary "Belarusian Waltz."  The documentary criticizes the tyranny and dictatorship in the political system of Belarus.

to 45 years of the director’s creative artistic efforts.  The film was the first documentary produced about the featured verite director himself.

In the closing ceremony of the Cinema Verite festival, the Iranian ministry of culture honored Master Leacock with a special trophy and rewarded him for his sincere and intellectual struggles to improve the purity of cinema and refine the spiritual values of documentary filmmaking.

Leacock went on the stage, trying not to shed tears and said with an excited, shaking voice: "This is the first time which I come to Iran.   I can not forget the affable compassion of its people; I will be proud of every moment of my presence in Iran."  And this is how Cinema Verite officially closed, by introducing the laureates and glorifying a master of documentary filmmaking.

The last event was a 4-hour visit to Iran's Carpet Museum which had been slated to allow participants and foreign guests to discover the historical art of carpet-waiving which is a national art belonging to Iranian people since 500 B.C. 

Kourosh Ziabari, born in 1990, an Iranian freelance journalist and cultural researcher, a member of Stony Brook University Publications' editorial team, a guest writer for BBC world service website, a contributor to PBS Media Shift, columnist of the Netherlands-based Poli Gazette magazine and the author of book "7+1". A number of his articles have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Malayan and Arabic.