Persian

Jafar Panahi is banned from making movies by the Iranian government, he poses as a taxi driver and makes a movie about social challenges in Iran. (IMDb)
Quote:
One can wonder how is it possible that the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced by the authoritarian regime of his country to 20 years without making cinema, still manages to direct clandestine masterpieces with a disarming simplicity, emotional truthfulness, social-political awareness, and delightfully humorous situations. Well, my theory is the following: if you really love what you do and have something to say, there’s nothing that can stop you.Read More »

During the Iran-Iraq war, Reza’s wife gives birth, and dies soon afterward. Reza is taken as POW. Shokooh finds Reza’s baby and raises her as her own. Many years later, Reza find’s his daughter again….Read More »

Experimental war film about two friends who travel back in time to the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War.Read More »

Sina, a sixteen years old teenager from today’s Tehranian middle class, experiences a new life on the verge of his parents’ divorce. Added to his very real sense of having been abandoned is the threat of a local thug who believes that Sina owes him a considerable sum of money. Things become even more complicated when Sina, taking advantage of his parents’ constant absence, allows an older girl, Nahid, to temporarily move in with him. Sina finds himself with the prospect of making choices that threaten his body and soul.Read More »

Quote:
Jaleh and Hamid are two youngsters from the third generation of Iranian immigrants in Turkey. Their families came here to have a peaceful life. We see two parallel narrations from two different periods of the young characters’ lives. One narration is about their first days of meeting and happiness. The other is about the eight crucial hours when they commit a robbery so they can use the money to start a happy life somewhere else. However, as often happens in such cases, they are led in a different direction.Read More »

Review by Jonathan Rosenbaum
A 1989 film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf about the upsetting discoveries made by a shell-shocked veteran of the Iran-Iraq war after he returns to his job as a photojournalist in Tehran and to his fiancee, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. As in The Peddler, Makhmalbaf shows considerable talent and passion for dealing with the contradictions of contemporary Iranian life, and the restless and eclectic style of his direction makes this one of his most penetrating and disturbing works. In Farsi with subtitles. 75 min.

This one is also on Rosenbaum’s top 1000 list.Read More »

Synopsis:
Nafas is a reporter who was born in Afghanistan, but fled with her family to Canada when she was a child. However, her sister wasn’t so lucky; she lost her legs to a land mine while young, and when Nafas and her family left the country, her sister was accidentally left behind. Nafas receives a letter from her sister announcing that she’s decided to commit suicide during the final eclipse before the dawn of the 21st century; desperate to spare her sister’s life, Nafas makes haste to Afghanistan, where she joins a caravan of refugees who, for a variety of reasons, are returning to the war-torn nation. As Nafas searches for her sister, she soon gets a clear and disturbing portrait of the toll the Taliban regime has taken upon its people.Read More »

Loneliness and isolation are a part of life for two mine keepers in a remote mountain town. Their only light of hope comes in the form of a small dog they find and an unknown woman they see walking in the distance. People enter and exit their lives, including a group of mine workers—but it is the very world they have created for themselves to deal with their loneliness that keeps others out. Nevertheless, they still ultimately find pleasure in the subtle and simple things of life.
Read More »

Tahmineh Milani’s “The Fifth Reaction”
An Iranian Woman Fighting for Her Rights
By Josef Schnelle

Five women sit in a restaurant in Tehran and talk about their husbands and their marriages. First, the conversations are quite amusing, but later on we notice that each woman faces serious problems below the thin surface of legal rights granted to women in Iran.Read More »