Iran

A director of a television series on the history of cinema, who has been grappling with the screenplay of his first feature film, receives an assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in a remote region of Zahedan province, near the Afghanistan border. He has already hired Turkoman tribespeople for his film and selected his filming location. Meanwhile his wife, who is working on her Ph.D. dissertation about the Mongol invasion of Iran, attempts to dissuade him from accepting the assignment. One night, while working on his history of the cinema series, the director fantasizes a diagetic world that consists of clever juxtapositions of his different worlds: the history of cinema, the history of the mongol invasion, his own film idea and his imminent assignment to the desert.Read More »

A young boy is locked into his apartment when his mother goes out and must care for his baby brother and cope with various domestic catastrophes while his grandmother and a neighbor try to locate his mother or the key to the apartment.Read More »

Quote:
Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan’s lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they’re mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?Read More »

Synopsis
Bahman Mohassess was a celebrated artist at the time of the Shah. Trained in Italy, he created sculptures and paintings in his homeland. But audiences often took offence at the pronounced phalli on his mostly naked bronze figures and his work was regularly censored.Read More »

Synopsis:
This film, based on a well-known novel of the same name by Sadegh Chooback, is about a wronged man seeking revenge. Director Amir Naderi’s inspiration for making the film was one of his childhood heroes, the legendary Zar Mohammad, who waged a one-man war against four swindlers and provoked wide spread popular sentiment against tyranny.Read More »

Tehran is a large village near the city of Rey, full of gardens and fruit trees.  Its inhabitants live in anthill-like underground holes.  The village’s several districts are constantly at war.  Tehranis’ main occupations are theft and crime, though the king pretends they are subject to him.  They grow excellent fruits, notably an excellent pomegranate, which is found only in Tehran.
– Asar-o-Lblab, 1241 A.D
Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! is a postmodern documentary that is as witty and engaging as it is informative.  The style of the film is fun and very visual, with the director, Massoud Bakhshi, using incredible archival footage, an original visual approach and terrific soundtrack that takes us through 150 years of Tehran’s history. Onscreen, Bakhshi may fail to complete his film, but he succeeds in both documenting Tehran’s history and entertaining us with its poignant contradictions.Read More »

Persian Carpet is an omnibus film produced by Iran’s National Carpet Center and Farabi Cinema Foundation where 15 renowned Iranian directors contributed films on the subject of Persian carpet. Carpets are the reflection of the cultural and historical identity of Iran.
In this collection, each director was free in the choice of the subject and the form, through which they are supposed to express whatever they feel for Persian carpet. Different subjects, in different forms of video clip, video art, documentary, animation, and narrative, and in various cities of Iran have been presented.Read More »

Det Means Girl focuses on young Schawan, a factory guard and also a caterer. His crippled sister Baloot and his father come to see him to seek medical treatment for the girl. The efforts of Schawan and his father however prove futile. They even resort to magic and talisman rituals to save the girl’s life.The film emphasises Jalili’s narrative style, which is becoming less conventional. Metaphors and symbolic references make the ending open to interpretations. In this film, Jalili’s main concern is a pictorial language, which results in powerful images that would inspire other artists, such as Shirin Nishat’s images of women inscribed with texts. Det Means Girl was only distributed on a limited scale and has been screened only a couple of times in Teheran, strictly during festivals. The film won awards in Venice and at Le Festival des Trois Continents in Nantes.Read More »

The police are after a drug lord named Naser Khakzad, but when they finally manage to catch him, he tries whatever he can think of to escape and save his family.Read More »