2025 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
The 2025 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema Presents Thought-Provoking Stories
L-R, Row 1: "Reading Lolita in Tehran," "Opponent," "Leila," "Hamoun," Row 2: "Seven Days, "The Old Bachelor," "The Witness," and "The Siren"
From June 14 through June 29 at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum
LOS ANGELES (April 15, 2025) –The UCLA Film & Television Archive and Farhang Foundation, are pleased to present this year’s compelling UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema. Over nine screenings from June 14 to 29, the series features a diverse lineup that spotlights the best contemporary and classic feature-length films from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. The films illuminate identity, resistance, cultural heritage, pressing human rights issues and the quest for justice. There is also a tribute to writer-director Dariush Mehrjui, recognizing his enduring impact on cinema and the arts.
Offering a unique lens into the struggles and triumphs of individuals navigating complex cultural landscapes, the series kicks off June 14 with Reading Lolita In Tehran (Italy/Israel, 2024), based on Azar Nafisi’s New York Times bestselling memoir. It’s directed by Eran Riklis and stars Golshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Mina Kavani. The screening will be preceded by the short film A Move (U.K./Iran, 2024), a documentary by Elahe Esmaili.
On June 15, the Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival first prize winner Suitcase (Iran, 2023) will screen at 3 p.m. followed by Milad Alami’s Opponent (Sweden/Norway, 2023), starring Payman Maadi, Marall Nasiri and Amirali Abanzad. At 7 p.m., the day will conclude with the Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival third prize winner The Dinner Party (Iran, 2023), followed by Ali SamadiAhadi’s Seven Days (Germany, 2024) starring Vishka Asayesh, Majid Bakhtiari, Tanaz Molaei.
The series continues June 20 with the Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival second prize winner Left Handed (Iran, 2024), followed by The Witness (Germany/Austria, 2024), starring Maryam Boubani, Nader Naderpour and Abbas Imani, and co-written and directed by Nader Saeivar. On June 21, the series will showcase films that delve into themes of tyranny, violence and the complexities of identity and exile, including And How Miserable is the Home of Evil (Switzerland/Iran, 2023) and The Old Bachelor (Iran, 2024), starring Hamed Behdad, Leila Hatami, and Hassan Pourshirazi.
June 22, the series continues with Celluloid Underground (U.K./Iran, 2023), directed by London-based Ehsan Khoshbakht. This film is a captivating blend of cinema history, memoir and a meditation on place and identity. It will be preceded by Razeh-del (U.K., 2024), an award-winning film by Maryam Tafakory that pays homage to Zan, Iran’s first women’s newspaper published in the 1990s.
Audiences will be treated to The Siren, on June 27, starring Mina Kavani, Hamidreza Djavdan and Parviz Sayyad, a visually striking 2D animated film directed by Sepideh Farsi. This poignant narrative follows 14-year-old Omid as he navigates the chaos of the Iran-Iraq War.
The series will conclude with a two-evening tribute on June 28-29 to the life and legacy of Iranian writer-director Dariush Mehrjui, whose influential work has shaped Iranian cinema for over five decades. The tribute will feature screenings of some of Mehrjui’s most iconic films, including Leila (Iran, 1997), starring Leila Hatami, Ali Mosaffa and Jamileh Sheikhi, Hamoon (Iran, 1990), starring Khosro Shakibai, Bita Farahi and Ezzatolah Entezami, and The Pear Tree (Iran, 1998), starring Homayoun Ershadi and Golshifteh Farahani; along with in-person appearances by two of the filmmaker’s children—Maryam Mehrjui and Safa Mehrjui.
Reflecting on the upcoming presentation, Paul Malcolm, senior public programmer at the Archive, said: “Some of the most engaged and engaging cinema in the world right now is being made by Iranian filmmakers, whether working in Iran or abroad as part of the Iranian diaspora, many of whom are putting their lives and freedoms at risk to add their voices to the cause of resistance. It is an honor to once again highlight their work at the Billy Wilder Theater with the generous support of our partners at the Farhang Foundation.”
Alireza Ardekani, chief executive officer of Farhang Foundation, added: “Farhang Foundation is honored to continue our incredible partnership with the UCLA Film & Television Archive in presenting the UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema — one of the longest-running showcases of Iranian film in the world. This important series provides a vital platform for Iranian filmmakers and storytellers to share their diverse voices, creative visions and cultural perspectives with a broader audience. We are proud to support this program and its role in fostering greater understanding, appreciation and dialogue through the art of cinema.”
The series is generously funded by the Farhang Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting Iranian art and culture.
In-person screenings are held at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum. All programs are free through June 2026, thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor. For more information, including program and admission details, please visit Cinema.UCLA.edu. Schedules and guest speakers are subject to change.
Below is each program summary with brief film notes.
Reading Lolita In Tehran (Italy/Israel, 2024)
Saturday, June 14 – 7:30pm
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.
Opponent (Sweden/Norway, 2023)
Sunday, June 15 – 3:00 pm
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.
Seven Days (Germany, 2024)
Sunday, June 15 – 7 pm
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.
The Witness (Germany/Austria, 2024)
Friday, June 20 – 7:30 pm
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.
The Old Bachelor (Iran, 2024)
Saturday, June 21 – 7:30 pm
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.
Celluloid Underground (U.K./Iran, 2023)
Sunday, June 22 – 7:00 pm
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.
The Siren (France/Germany/Luxembourg/Belgium, 2023)
Friday, June 27 – 7:30 pm
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.
Tribute to Dariush Mehrjui
The Archive is honored to present a two-evening tribute (June 28 and 29) to the life and legacy of Iranian writer-director Dariush Mehrjui whose 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 explored the psychological toll of fear, ignorance and oppression on the lives of individuals with grace, insight and poetry.
Leila (Iran, 1997)
Saturday, June 28 – 7:30 pm
In Person: Maryam Mehrjui and Safa Mehrjui, daughter and son of Dariush Mehrjui)
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.
Hamoon (Iran, 1990)
Sunday, June 29 – 7:00 pm
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.
For more information, including program and admission details, please visit Farhang.org/UCLA25. Schedules and guest speakers are subject to change.
About the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Established in 1965, a division of UCLA Library, the Archive is internationally renowned for rescuing, preserving and showcasing moving image media and is dedicated to ensuring that the visual achievements of our time are available for information, education and enjoyment. The Archive has over 500,000 film and television holdings conserved in a state-of-the-art facility at the Packard Humanities Institute Stoa in Santa Clarita, CA, that is designed to hold materials ranging from nitrate film to digital video at all preservation standards. Many of the Archive’s projects are screened at prestigious film events around the globe.
The Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum is the home of the UCLA Film & Television Archives public programs. The theater is among a handful of venues nationwide able to exhibit an entire century's worth of moving images in their original formats. From the earliest silent films requiring variable speed projection all the way up to cutting-edge digital cinema, the Wilder can accommodate an array of screen technologies.
About Farhang Foundation
Farhang Foundation is a member supported nonpolitical, nonreligious, and not-for-profit organization dedicated to celebrating and promoting the richness of Iranian art and culture for the betterment of society as a whole. With a singular mission at its core, the Foundation strives to preserve, nurture, and share the diverse heritage of Iran with the global community. Through steadfast commitment, the Foundation supports a wide array of academic, artistic, and cultural programs and initiatives, fostering collaborative partnerships with esteemed universities, renowned museums, and the vibrant world of performing arts. These partnerships enable the Foundation to cultivate a deeper understanding and appreciation of the multifaceted aspects of Iranian culture and promote cross-cultural dialogue.
Media Contact:
Tannaz Guivi
Phone: 310-666-1546
Email: press@farhang.org
