Iran

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Rapture is an installation of two synchronized black-and-white video sequences that are projected on opposite walls; large in scale, they evoke cinema screens. Working with hours of footage and a team of editors, the artist constructed two parallel narratives: on one side of the room, men populate an architectural environment; in the other sequence, women move within a natural one. The piece begins with images of a stone fortress and a hostile desert, respectively. The fortress dissolves into a shot of over one hundred men—uniformly dressed in plain white shirts and black pants—walking quickly through the cobblestone streets of an old city and entering the gates of the fortress. Simultaneously, the desert scene dissolves into a shot of an apparently equal number of women, wearing flowing, full-length veils, or chadors, emerging from different points in the barren landscape.Read More »

Jean Rouch’s camera follows his friend, filmmaker/actor/critic Farrokh Ghaffari, as he walks and talks us through the famous Shah Mosque in Esfehan. While guiding him and answering his questions, Ghaffari makes Rouch discover the beauties of the architecture of the mosque and its impact on the city. Throughout the tour, they discuss Islam’s complex relationship with death, sex and cinema.Read More »

Sara is the perfect young housewife, eager to serve. When husband Hessam requires an expensive emergency operation abroad, it is she who get the funds. For the next three years, it is Sara, labouring secretly to pay the shady loan and save Hessam’s manly pride. Until the truth is revealed and with it, the reality of her marriage.Read More »

In an Iranian juvenile detention center, a group of adolescent girls serve their sentence for the grave crime of murdering their father, their husband or another male family member. Filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei built a remarkable relationship with these inmates, whose frank conversations and playful interactions he observes, and who privately open up about the consequences of, and sometimes the reasons for, their action.

Occasionally he leaves them alone with the camera, allowing it to become a tool for them to address both their victims in the afterlife and their accomplices—three of the girls committed their father’s killing together with their mothers, who are now on death row.Read More »

Jafar Panahi sets out to find a young woman with a golden voice that has been forbidden to sing by Iranian authorities.Read More »

Author Golrokh Kamali has left her husband and has been living with her parents in the provinces for the past year. When she returns to the capital city, she finds out that her husband has gone bankrupt and that a group of unscrupulous businessmen are threatening to imprison him for debt. Although still angry about her husband’s past infidelities, and in spite of her previous pessimistic views about life with him, she comes to his defense and tries to help him overcome his problem. Starring Mozhdeh Shamsai as Golrokh and Majid Mozaffari as her husband. Nominated for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Female Lead Actress (Mozhdeh Shamsai), Best Male and Best Female Supporting Actors, Best Set Design, and Best Sound at the 19th Fajr Film Festival, where it also won the Audience Choice Award.Read More »

An old man is haunted at a movie theater where he works as a janitor.Read More »

The car of a war refugee who is now living in Tehran is stolen. He with the help of his son begins a desperate search for finding his stolen car. Meanwhile he meets a man who can help him and his son Borna is too after his missing eyeglasses.Read More »

Sohrab, a provincial young writer, is lost in the desert on the way to Tehran to get a publication license for his book on old Persian poetry, but the trip involves some bizarre events.Read More »