Celebration of Iranian Cinema at UCI-2019
Join us for the 4th Annual CELEBRATION OF IRANIAN CINEMA in Orange County at the University of California, Irvine September 7-8, 2019. In collaboration with the Jordan Center for Persian Studies, UCI. Special thanks to our co presenter: The UCLA Film & Televisions Archives.
VIP Package includes admission to all films + invitation to the VIP reception on opening night.
Limited packages available.
UCI Students with valid I.D. - Free Admission based on availability on the day of each screening.
All films in Persian with English subtitles.
Hotel accommodations provided by:
Saturday, September, 7 – 4:00 pm
Hendi and Hormoz (Hendi va Hormoz)
Rugged and delicate beauty exist side-by-side on the red sand island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf where 13-year-old Hendi is married off to the 16-year-old Hormoz on his promise of a job at the local mine. When the job falls through, the young couple must struggle to make their way against difficult odds in a land as spellbinding as it is unforgiving.
Director: Abbas Amini
Screenwriter: Hossein Farrokhzadeh, A. Amini
Cast: Hamed Alipour, Zohreh Eslam, Asma Daneh-chin
DCP, Color, 88 min.
Saturday, September, 7 – 7:00 pm
Sheeple (Maghz-haye Koochak Zang-Zadeh)
2018
Navid Mohammadzadeh stars as the slow-witted, grasping brother of Shakur (Aslani), a meth dealer and procurer who acts as reigning patriarch for both their impoverished neighborhood and their highly dysfunctional family. When rumors about their sister are exposed, a violent, domestic power struggle breaks into the open. Writer-director Hooman Seyedi doesn’t pull any punches in this sordid tale of corruption that culminates in one of the best action set pieces in contemporary Iranian cinema.
Director/Screenwriter: Hooman Seyedi
Cast: Navid Mohammadzadeh, Farhad Aslani, Farid Sajjadi Hosseini
DCP, Color, 102 min.
Screens with
Temporary
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival 2018 - Second Prize Winner
Shot with a piercing frankness, Temporary confronts us with the hard choices to be made by a young, single mother and the willingness of a religious establishment to condone her exploitation.
Director/Screenwriter: Behzad Azadi
DCP, Color, 16 min.
Sunday, September, 8 – 4:00 pm
Before Summer Ends
Director Maryam Goormaghtigh weaves a most beguiling blend of fiction and non-fiction in this semi-documentary feature about a trio of Iranian ex-pat bros who take a road trip through the shimmering French countryside before one of their own returns to Iran. The expected riffs on male obsessions—women, partying, women—come finer-edged with melancholy, regret and loneliness as the friends also reflect on their lives in self-imposed exile.
Director: Maryam Goormaghtigh
Cast: Arash, Ashkan, Hossein
DCP, Color, 102 min.
Screens with
Turquoise (Firouzeh)
2018
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival 2018 - Third Prize Winner
The residents of a rural village are infected with greed and paranoia when rumors of a buried treasure drive them to tear up their own fields and eventually turn on each other but what seems like a case of local madness proves part of a much larger mystery.
Director: Roozbeh Misaghi
Screenwriter: Sama Raufi, Roozbeh Misaghi
DCP, Color, 15 min.
Sunday, September, 8 – 7:00 pm
Tehran: City of Love
Iran/UK/The Netherlands 2019
Three lonely hearts—a bodybuilder, a receptionist and a religious singer—navigate the chilly waters of romance in an alienating urban landscape that puts the irony in the title of writer-director Ali Jaberansari’s second feature. Jaberansari’s deadpan humor and a wry visual style make this an offbeat romantic comedy that suggests it's the absurdity of pursuing love, not its triumphs, that really makes us human.
Director: Ali Jaberansari
Screenwriter: A. Jaberansari, Maryam Najafi
Cast: Forough Ghajabegli, Mehdi Saki, Amir Hessam Bakhtiar
DCP, Color, 102 min.
Screens with
Scent of Geranium
2018
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival 2018 - First Prize Winner
A young woman reflects on her mother’s gardening lessons in Tehran as a path to understanding and accepting her own experience as an immigrant in director Naghmeh Farzaneh’s wonderfully animated short.
Director: Naghmeh Farzaneh
DCP, Color, 5 min.
Event Details
| Event Starts | 09/07/2019 |
| Event Ends | 09/08/2019 |
| Individual Price | General Admission: $12 / VIP Package: $75 (incl. admission to all films + invitation to VIP reception on opening night - limited packages available) / Free Admission - Students with valid ID (based on availability 1 hour prior to each screening) |
| Location | UCI Crystal Cove Auditorium |
