Iran

Two brothers are involved in a dispute over a house in urban Tehran. It is only through a series of adventures with the tenants that they are able to settle their differences.Read More »

The School We Went To based on a story by Fereydoon Doostdar and Dariush Mehrjui and starring Ali Nassirian. Plot Summary: At the Justice on the Horizons School everything turns on bullying and threats from the school principal. The students are unhappy about this situation and they complain about it in the Wall newspaper. The principal is frightened about the opening of the eyes and ears of the students and he shuts down the Wall. The students protest and with the cooperation of the literature teacher they persuade the principal to agree to the remounting of the Wall newspaper. Some people have seen the film as an allegory for the 1978 Iranian revolution while others have criticized it as propaganda driven more by the Islamic regime than by Mehrjui.Read More »

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While on the surface Mr. Gullible contains all the hallmarks of a good comedy, at its heart this movie portrays with uncommon clarity the pitfalls of love and the pain of betrayal. When the protagonist leaves his small village and travels to Tehran to find a wife, he does so with all the gusto and naivete of one who has not experienced the world. Yet even when Mr. Gullible encounters some of the harsh realities of the big city, he is not dissuaded from accomplishing his mission to find a bride. When he finally meets what he believes is the perfect woman, Mr Gullible showers her with gifts and asks her to marry him. However, his romantic visions of life with his lady love are obliterated when he discovers her true identity. Festivals/Awards: Special Jury Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival, 1971; Best film, best direction, best screenplay, best actress, best supporting actor at the Third National Film Festival Sepas, 1971.Read More »

This highly symbolic Iranian drama (shot in black-and-white) revolves around the most important figure in a remote rural village. That figure is the village’s sole cow, owned by Mashdi Hassan (Ezat Entezani). The beginning of the film makes clear just how vital the cow is to the life of the village and how much Mashdi and his neighbors cherish it. When the cow is threatened and then killed by members of a nearby clan, Mashdi becomes so distraught that he is gradually transformed into a cow himself. One highlight of this film is the glimpse it offers into a style of rural life which has gone unchanged for thousands of years.Read More »

“Che” depicts 48 hours of Mostafa Chamran’s life, who was the first post-Islamic Revolution defense minister of Iran. On August 16 and 17, 1979 he was sent by Ayatullah Khomeini to command several military operations in the civil war in the Kordestan region which was besieged by anti-revolutionary forces. The film was submitted to the 32nd Fajr International Film Festival and won two Crystal Simorghs in the fields of best editing and best visual effects. In addition to Chamran the film is also about Asghar Vesali who was killed during the war and the people of Paveh in Kermanshah province.Read More »

Synopsis
The story is based on true events that took place in 1987. Sardasht, a Kurdish city in the Iran/Iraq border, along with several villages in the surrounding areas are attacked with chemical weapons by Iraqi forces. Ghader, a villager from the area and his pregnant wife, as well as his three young children, are exposed to the chemicals and suffer injuries. The situation in the village and surrounding cities is chaotic. Ghader must singlehandedly try to keep his family alive.Read More »

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In a remote region of Afghanistan, underprivileged children seek shelter under an elaborate maze of abandoned sewer pipes. Mirvais is one of these children. Though Mirvais is happy to find work carrying around a disabled boy around on his back, he begins to question his duties when his young master attempts to expand his otherwise simple job description. Over time, a sado-masochistic relationship develops between the two boys.Read More »

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 »