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An In-Person Screening Event
BILLY WILDER THEATER - HAMMER MUSEUM
Los Angeles

The UCLA Film & Television Archive is proud to continue its long tradition of bringing the best cinema from Iran and the Iranian diaspora to Los Angeles. Ever mindful of the ongoing struggles facing Iranian filmmakers in their native country, this year’s program champions the work of new and emerging directors while bringing back to the screen a long-thought-lost landmark of Iranian cinema. We are also once again happy to present selected finalists from the 2024 edition of the Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival. The power of the moving image to connect people otherwise distanced by cultural, political, and national divides and to lift them up in times of crisis has been embodied nowhere more profoundly over the last several decades than in the humanism, artistry and courage of Iranian filmmakers. The Archive is honored to highlight their work, again, at the Billy Wilder Theater.

Writer-director Dariush Mehrjui studied cinema and philosophy at UCLA before returning to Iran in the late 1960s where his second feature The Cow is credited with launching the Iranian New Wave. A giant of Iran cinema for over five decades until his untimely, tragic death in 2023, Mehrjui was a fierce critic of the Iranian regime and fought government censorship throughout his career. In his films, he explored the psychological toll of fear, ignorance and oppression on the lives of individuals with grace, insight and poetry. The Archive is honored to present a two-evening tribute (June 28 and 29) to his life and legacy featuring some of his greatest works.

All films from Iran are in Persian with English subtitles, except where noted.

Farhang Foundation is proud to be the sole sponsor of the UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema.

Saturday, June 14 – 7:30pm

Reading Lolita In Tehran

Italy/Israel, 2024

In Person: Actor Zar Amir and screenwriter Marjorie David

Based on Azar Nafisi’s New York Times Best Seller memoir, this sweeping story of perseverance and resistance follows a literature professor (Golshifteh Farahani) from her return to Tehran with her husband in 1979 during the brief window of optimism after the Iranian Revolution through to her eventual exile again in 1997. In between, Nafisi began a book salon in her home that became a refuge for like-minded women watching their rights, professions and freedoms stripped away. Daisy Miller, Pride and Prejudice and, of course, Lolita, along with other Western classics offered the frameworks through which they could make sense of their situation and find the courage to survive it. Brought to the screen by an all-star cast, Nafisi’s story remains as timely and inspiring as ever.

Director: Eran Riklis
Screenwriter: Marjorie David
Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mina Kavani

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 108 min.

Preceded By

A Move

U.K./Iran, 2024

Filmmaker Elahe Esmaili has stopped wearing a hijab, an act of liberation her parents seem resigned to while she helps them pack up their home. They are decidedly less so when she joins them and their extended family at an Eid celebration, fearing what their relatives will think. In this deftly framed personal documentary, Esmaili captures the multigenerational clash of tradition and change felt by families across Iran.

Director: Elahe Esmaili

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 27 min.

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Sunday, June 15 – 3:00 pm

Opponent

Sweden/Norway, 2023

Payman Maadi delivers a surprising and deeply affecting performance as Iman, an Iranian exile newly arrived in Sweden with his wife and two young children where they anxiously await word on their application for political asylum. A professional wrestler in Iran, Iman joins a local wrestling club in the hopes it will improve their chances to stay. As Iman begins to find renewed purpose, Maryam (Marall Nasiri), his wife, feels hers slipping away. But family tensions are only part of this complex portrait of the exile experience and coming to terms with one's true identity as Iman finds himself again enmeshed by the same rumors and desires that forced him to flee in the first place.

Director/Screenwriter: Milad Alami
Cast: Payman Maadi, Marall Nasiri, Amirali Abanzad

DCP, color, in Swedish and Persian with English subtitles, 119 min.

Preceded By

Suitcase

Iran, 2023

Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival 1st Prize Winner

From a large red suitcase laying on the cement of an underpass emerges an even larger man who proceeds about his day in the streets of Tehran — until, after a momentary distraction, he turns to find his suitcase has been stolen. As he desperately searches the city, memories of his previous life flood back and the sense of loss compounds in this by turns surreal and deeply poignant representation of the refugee experience.

Directors/Screenwriters: Saman Hosseinpuor, Ako Zandkarimi

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 15 min.

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Sunday, June 15 – 7 pm

Seven Days

Germany, 2024

In Person: Actor Vishka Asayesh

A human rights activist in Iran, Maryam (Vishka Asayesh) has been imprisoned for six years when she’s granted a seven-day medical leave. When he learns of this from exile with their two children in Germany, her husband (Majid Bakhtiari) arranges to have her smuggled across the border where they will meet her. What seems like an extraordinary chance for freedom becomes for Maryam a heartbreaking moral dillemma: rejoin her family, including her teenage daughter, or remain in solidarity with the political movement she joined to fight for her daughter’s future. Directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi and written by Mohammad Rasoulof, Seven Days is a raw, intense exploration of the cost of resistance and freedom.

Director: Ali Samadi Ahadi
Screenwriter: Mohammad Rasoulof
Cast: Vishka Asayesh, Majid Bakhtiari, Tanaz Molaei

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 113 min.

Preceded By

The Dinner Party

Iran, 2023

Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival 3rd Prize Winner

Neda Jebelli makes her directorial debut with this penetrating short film about an engagement party that goes off the rails. Shooting entirely in the kitchen where a conservative mother tries to hold things together as the cake delivery is delayed by street protests outside and her daughter refuses to sit with her fiancé, Jebelli makes sharp use of off-screen space and sound to underscore a sense of sweeping societal chan

Director/Screenwriter: Neda Jebelli

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 13 min.

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Friday, June 20 – 7:30 pm

The Witness

Germany/Austria, 2024

Winner of the audience award in the Orizzonti Extra section of last year’s Venice Film Festival, The Witness was co-written by director Nader Saeivar and Jafar Panahi who both won the best screenplay prize at Cannes for Panahi’s 3 Faces (2018). Maryam Boubani delivers a compelling performance as a retired teacher and family matriarch who suspects her son-in-law, a powerful government official, of murdering her adoptive daughter. A riveting portrait of a woman driven to seek her own justice in defiance of the malign forces working to conceal the truth, The Witness itself definitely challenges Iran’s censorship regime with images of liberated women unseen in Iranian cinema for generations.

Director: Nader Saeivar
Screenwriter: Nader Saeivar, Jafar Panahi
Cast: Maryam Boubani, Nader Naderpour, Abbas Imani

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 100 min.

Preceded By

Left Handed

Iran, 2024

Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival 2nd Prize Winner

Maryam, a 38-year-old factory worker, is the head of a family of four, struggling to make ends meet. In a desperate act to support her family, she makes a drastic and traumatic decision related to her job. This decision leads to unforeseen consequences, leaving her in a situation she never anticipated and facing a new, unexpected fate.

Director/Screenwriter: Nasrin Mohammadpour

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 15 min.

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Saturday, June 21 – 7:30 pm

The Old Bachelor

Iran, 2024

Writer-director Oktay Baraheni’s second feature taps into global anxieties as a monumental domestic drama that doubles as an acute study of tyranny and violence. The lives of two half brothers have reached a dead end in the expansive, decaying mansion they share with their domineering father who wallows away his days on drugs, sex workers and emotionally torturing his sons. When he sets his lascivious sights on a younger woman (Leila Hatami), her presence disrupts the trio’s long-suffered equilibrium. Baraheni and his magnetic cast masterfully ratchet up the tension, building to an astonishing climax as wills are tested, lines are crossed, and secrets are revealed.

Director/Screenwriter: Oktay Baraheni
Cast: Leila Hatami, Hamed Behdad, Hassan Pourshirazi

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 192 min.

Preceded By

And How Miserable Is The Home Of Evil

Switzerland/Iran, 2023

Exiled Iranian filmmaker Saleh Kashefi manipulates official state media of sermons delivered by Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to enact his overthrow at the hands of an off-screen uprising.

Director: Saleh Kashefi

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles.

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Sunday, June 22 – 7:00 pm

Celluloid Underground

U.K./Iran, 2023

Growing up in Iran, London-based director Ehsan Khoshbakht discovered his love for the movies in a country where they were forbidden. Not content to watch films alone, he started a film club that put him in the sights of the authorities but also brought him into contact with a mysterious film collector who, he learns, rescued hundreds of film prints from the hands of the government after the revolution. Part cinema history, part memoir, part mediation on place, identity and the passions that can sustain one through exile, Khoshbakht weaves multiple intersecting lines of inquiry in this always fascinating film essay.

Director: Ehsan Khoshbakht

DCP, color, in English and Persian with English subtitles, 80 min.

Preceded By

Razeh-Del

U.K., 2024

An award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at Cannes, Locarno, the New York Film Festival and other international festivals, Maryam Tafakory constructs spellbinding assemblages of archive film footage and original imagery to “dissect veiled acts of erasure — of bodies, intimacies, and histories.” Her latest work is an homage to Zan, Iran’s first post-revolution women’s newspaper published in the 1990s, through reader letters, scenes from classic Iranian films and the reveries of two school girls inspired by its pages to seize the power of their own representations.

Director: Maryam Tafakory

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 27 min.

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Friday, June 27 – 7:30 pm

The Siren

France/Germany/Luxembourg/Belgium, 2023

For 14-year-old Omid, the Iran-Iraq War begins with rockets tearing over a soccer game he’s playing with his friends in the Iranian port of Abadan. After Omid refuses to evacuate with his mother, he takes over an injured friend’s food delivery route that brings him into contact with a disparate group of eccentrics struggling to survive the chaos. With the city soon poised to fall, they band together to devise a daring escape plan. In deploying a 2D animation style to tell this story of war, director Sepideh Farsi (Red Rose, 2015 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema) confronts its horrors head on while illuminating in fresh and visually compelling ways the humanity besieged by it.

Director: Sepideh Farsi
Screenwriter: Javad Djavahery
Cast: Mina Kavani, Hamidreza Djavdan, Parviz Sayyad

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 100 min.

Preceded By

In the Shadow of the Cypress

Iran, 2023

In Person: Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani

Join us for a screening of the 2025 Academy Award®-winning short animated film IN THE SHADOW OF THE CYPRESS with an exclusive screening and live conversation with the film’s visionary creators. Experience firsthand the powerful storytelling, innovative animation, and deeply human themes that captivated audiences worldwide. Discover the behind-the-scenes journey of bringing this groundbreaking film to life from the filmmakers themselves in an intimate and insightful conversation.

Writers / Directors: Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani
Cast: Zahra Moosavi

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Saturday, June 28 – 7:30 pm

Leila

Iran, 1997

In Person: Maryam Mehrjui and Safa Mehrjui, daughter and son of Dariush Mehrjui, and special guest Shohreh Aghdashloo

Soon after meeting at a joyful gathering of family and friends, Leila (Leila Hatami) and Reza (Ali Mosaffa) are happily married. When Leila learns she can’t have children, however, that supportive network of relations becomes an unrelenting force of social pressure that threatens to drive them apart, most forcefully articulated by Reza’s domineering mother who insists Leila allow Reza to take a second wife. Hatami delivers a devastating performance in Dariush Mehrjui’s unforgettable portrait of a woman under emotional siege that film critic Amy Taubin called “the most brilliant depiction of a marriage gone to hell that I’ve ever seen.”

Director: Dariush Mehrjui
Screenwriters: Mahnaz Ansarian, Dariush Mehrjui
Cast: Leila Hatami, Ali Mosaffa, Jamileh Sheikhi

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 102 min.

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Sunday, June 29 – 7:00 pm

Hamoon

Iran, 1990

In Person: Maryam Mehrjui and Safa Mehrjui, daughter and son of Dariush Mehrjui

“Why did it go wrong? How did it start?” So ruminates a bitter Hamoon (Khosro Shakibai) after his wife (Bita Farahi) demands a divorce, but the questions about his marriage take on ever stronger existential consequences. A middle manager at a trading company, the middle-aged Hamoon aspires to the intellectual life (his wife is a celebrated abstract painter) but his struggle to complete a philosophy thesis only compounds his sense of anger and resentment. Director and co-writer Dariush Mehrjui shakes up his acute study of a marriage and a life on the rocks with unreliable flashbacks and surreal dream sequences that draw us inexorably deeper in Hamoon’s collapsing psychology.

Director/Screenwriter: Dariush Mehrjui
Screenwriters: Dariush Mehrjui, Haroon Yashayayi
Cast: Khosro Shakibai, Bita Farahi, Ezzatolah Entezami

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 120 min.

Preceded By

The Pear Tree

Iran, 1998

In Person: Maryam Mehrjui and Safa Mehrjui, daughter and son of Dariush Mehrjui

An intellectual author struggling with writer’s block, Mahmoud (Homayoun Ershadi) retreats to the country villa where he grew up only to be confronted by a prized pear tree that refuses to bear fruit and aching memories of his first love, played by a radiant Golshifteh Farahani making her feature film debut. In Dariush Mehrjui’s masterpiece of middle-aged doubt, the personal and the political steep in longing and regret while almost every shot comes suffused in golden, autumnal light captured through the lens of cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari.

Director: Dariush Mehrjui
Screenwriters: Dariush Mehrjui, Goli Taraghi

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 95 min.

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