UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema 2023
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. Mindful of the present moment, this year’s program celebrates individual films by emerging and established filmmakers, while acknowledging the resilience and courage of Iranian mediamakers, artists and activists, in general. This year’s selections give voice through cinema to the struggles of women and other marginalized communities in Iran against the systems, political and cultural, that continue to oppress them.
We are thrilled to open this year’s series with the powerful new documentary by director Mandana Biscotti, The Voice of Dust and Ash (2022), about the life of one artist, legendary Iranian classical singer Mohammad Reza Shajarian, who devoted his art to the cause of freedom. We also dedicate a night of programming, curated by filmmaker and activist Roya Rastegar, to works that speak directly to and about the issues driving the ongoing protests.
The Archive is also thrilled to include this year the six finalists from the 2022 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.
All films from Iran and 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, April 29 – 7:30 pm
The Voice of Dust and Ash
Iran, 2022
In Person: Filmmaker Mandana Biscotti
In her timely directorial debut, documentarian Mandana Biscotti weaves an intimate and powerful portrait of Iranian music icon Mohammad Reza Shajarian. From his childhood reciting the Quran at political rallies at the behest of his conservative father to his first performances under a pseudonym to escape his family’s disapproval, Shajarian developed a classical singing style that made him a star. When the regime—which otherwise banned music—sought to co-opt his fame, Shajarian resisted and became the voice of a generation, his song “Morghe Sahar” becoming an anthem for Iranian liberation. Through interviews with Shajarian, archival concert footage and reenactments, Biscotti illuminates the artist’s craft alongside his principled commitment to speak for the oppressed.
Director: Mandana Biscotti
Cast: Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Navid Negahban
DCP, color, in English and Persian with English subtitles, 84 min
Preceded by
Inner Self (Nahan)
Iran, 2020
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival Finalist
A violinist is barred by authorities from entering the building where she is expected to perform because she lacks the required hijab. Forced to stay in the waiting room, she’s inspired to deliver her own concert in protest.
Director/Screenwriter: Mohammad Hormozi
Cast: Niloofar Mohebbi, Mehrbanoo Batebi, Maryam Jamalipour
Digital, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 16 min.
Sunday, April 30 – 7:00 pm
The Carriage Driver (Doroshkechi)
Iran, 1971
Director Nosrat Karimi’s pre-revolutionary Iranian classic opens on a funeral and ends with a violent conflagration, yet somehow remains deliriously funny every minute all along the way. When a family patriarch dies, a carriage driver sees his chance to finally marry the woman he’s loved since they were children but her son refuses to consider the match until he’s finished mourning. Karimi spins this set up—and all the carriage driver’s plotting to follow—into a wide-ranging satire of social mores, courtship rituals, gender roles and masculine posing that leaves hardly any character unscathed. Digitally restored with new English subtitles, The Carriage Driver recently played at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, where programmer Ehsan Koshbahkt declared it not only Karimi’s best film but “one of the finest comedies in the history of Iranian cinema.”
Director/Screenwriter: Nosrat Karimi
Cast: Nosrat Karimi, Shahla Riahi, Masoud Asadollahi
DCP, B&W, in Persian with English subtitles, 115 min.
Friday, May 5 – 7:30 pm
Until Tomorrow
Iran/France, 2022
Writer-director Ali Asgari has been racking up international accolades for a series of shorts and his debut feature, Disappearance (2017), which bring dramatic urgency to the precarious position of women in Iranian society. With Until Tomorrow, Asgari expands on the premise of his 2014 short The Baby in which a young woman has 24 hours to find someone to watch the infant she’s kept a secret from her parents who are coming for a visit. Rising star Sadaf Asgari (Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness) plays Fereshteh with single-minded drive as she and her friend (Ghazal Shojaei) face obstacle after obstacle in their pursuit to simply secure reliable childcare.
Director: Ali Asgari
Director/Screenwriter: Alireza Khatami, Ali Asgari
Cast: Sadaf Asgari, Ghazal Shojaei, Babak Karimi
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 86 min.
Preceded By
Kooseh, A Man Who Can’t Grow A Beard
Iran, 2022
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival Finalist
Samim, a teenage Afghan refugee boy with a secret, works illegally in a banquet hall in Tehran. The head waiter in the hall discovers Samim’s big secret and has his sights on him.
Director/Screenwriter: Behzad Azadi
Cast: Mohammad Gholizadeh, Jabar Pishevar, Sadeq Moradi
Digital, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 15 min.
Sunday, May 7 – 7:00 pm
Shorts Program - Curated with Roya Rastegar
In Person: Filmmaker Roya Rastegar
What is cinema, in the midst of a revolution? When 22-year old Kurdish Iranian woman Jina Mahsa Amini was visiting Tehran with her family, she was detained, beaten and ultimately murdered by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her hijab improperly. Women and girls in Iran have since taken to the streets in protest of the brutality and inequality the state imposes on women, especially those from ethnic minority groups. The feminist Kurdish call—Jin, Jiyan, Azadi(“Woman, Life, Freedom”)—reverberates around the world as a rallying cry of women, girls, students, workers, artists, journalists and marginalized communities fighting for their human rights as the necessary precondition for fundamental change. Months of protests have turned into a nation-wide revolution focusing on women’s rights not as a solitary issue, but as intersectional to a more capacious freedom movement for economic stability, anti-racist solidarity on a global scale, and the end of state-sanctioned policing and violence. Curated by cultural activist, filmmaker and scholar Roya Rastegar, this program of short works brings together current short fiction and documentary films, vital news perspectives and stunning pieces that have captivated the attention of audiences around the world through social media.
Short Films Screening:
Diaries of a Revolution, Baraye Farzandaneman, Futility Season, Rise, That’s Life, At the Edge of the Revolution, The Interpreter, Iran-e-Man
Various media. Total runtime approx. 120 min.
Monday, May 8 – 7:30 pm
The Last Snow (Barf-e Akhar)
Iran, 2022
A wintry chill suffuses every frame of co-writer-director Amirhossein Asgari’s second feature, a fact of life in the remote mountain region where it’s set but also a reflection of the main character’s inner world. A local veterinarian, Yousef (Amin Hayai), nurses deep wounds, physical and emotional, after he was badly burned in a barn fire and his wife left him as a result of his injuries. He excises his quiet rage by hunting wolves at night. The wild creatures are being reintroduced to the region and he—along with the area’s farmers—blame their return for every recent misfortune, including the disappearance of a local young woman.
Director: Amirhossein Asgari
Screenwriter: Amir-Mohammad Abdi, Seyed Hassan Hosseini, Amirhossein Asgari
Cast: Amin Hayai, Ladan Mostofi, Majid Salehi
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 119 min.
Preceded By
113
Iran, 2019
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival Finalist
Exhausted by the demands of military life, a soldier finds a place to nap under the table in a strategy planning room. He awakes to find himself eavesdropping on a top secret meeting of high ranking officers discussing his disappearance.
Director: Neda Assef
Screenwriter: Ali Shams
Cast: Ali Pooya Ghasemi
Digital, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 8 min.
Friday, May 12 – 7:30 pm
World War III (Jang-e Jahani Sevom)
Iran, 2022
A day laborer devastated by personal tragedy, Shakib (Mohsen Tanabandeh) gets a second chance when he suddenly lands the lead role in a low-budget film, a barely plausible exploitation riff on the Holocaust. But opportunity brings sharks and Shakib proves ill-equipped to negotiate the forces scheming around him. Writer-director Houman Seyedi’s gritty crime film, Sheeple (screened here in 2019), was an explosive examination of the cycle of violence roiling an impoverished Iranian neighborhood. While the title of his latest thriller suggests an even greater conflagration in pursuit of similar themes, Seyedi takes a slow burn approach—albeit one loaded with provocations.
Director: Houman Seyedi
Screenwriter: Houman Seyedi, Arian Vazir Daftari, Azad Jafarian
Cast: Mohsen Tanabandeh, Neda Jebreili, Mahsa Hejazi
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 107 min.
Preceded By
White Winged Horse (Asbe sefide baldar,)
Iran, 2020
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival Finalist
The figure of a white-winged horse has haunted Taha since childhood—an emblem of the sweetheart he left behind years ago when war tore apart their town. Now, Taha returns with big hopes that he can win her heart
Director/Screenwriter: Mahyar Mandegar
Cast: Sepehir Tehranchi, Hasan Najarian, Mohammad Bashir
Digital, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 16 min.
Saturday, May 13 – 7:30 pm
Wind of Change (Solouk)
Iran, 2022
Before Sara (Narges Mohmmadi) has time to process news of her teenage daughter’s troubled behavior at school, she’s confronted with an even more serious concern: her husband has gone missing. Sometime in the night, after a routine argument, he just up and left, leaving behind a mystery that falls almost entirely on Sara to solve. What comes quicker into view though is just how dependent she had become on him to survive. Writer-director Abbas Rafei deftly balances suspense with social commentary as Sara simultaneously searches for her husband while struggling to reclaim her and her daughter’s independence.
Director/Screenwriter: Abbas Rafei
Cast: Narges Mohmmadi, Fariba Naderi, Hana Harandi
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 86 min.
Preceded By
Nazri
Iran, 2022
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival Finalist
After it was publicly revealed that Omid and his best friend Masoud were engaged in a same-sex relationship, Omid commits suicide. In the wake of tragedy, his grieving mother prepares a traditional Nazari meal offering with a secret ingredient, prepared especially for those who tormented her son.
Director: Saleh Alavizadeh
Screenwriter: Saleh Alavizadeh, Reza Morshed
Cast: Hamid Sharififard, Soheila Dadashi, Mansour Alavizadeh
Digital, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 13 min.
Sunday, May 14 – 7:00 pm
Leila’s Brothers
Iran, 2022
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival where it premiered in competition, Leila’s Brothers is a sweeping family drama that cuts to the heart of Iranian’s patriarchal society. The incomparable Taraneh Alidoosti delivers a magnetic performance as a weary sister whose future depends on her feckless brothers and father. When she sets a plan in motion to break free, old family faultlines crack open and it’s anyone’s guess where the pieces will fall. Writer-director Saeed Roostaee vaults to the forefront of leading Iranian filmmakers with his bravura orchestration of a powerhouse ensemble cast and the story’s series of twists and turns.
Director/Screenwriter: Saeed Roustaee
Cast: Payman Maadi, Taraneh Alidoosti, Navid Mohammadzadeh
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 159 min.
Preceded By
Faranak
Iran, 2021
Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival Finalist
Fired from his job, behind on his rent and abandoned by his wife, a burnt-out taxi driver gets an unusual passenger who is more similar to him than meets the eye. Faranak is the story of an unlikely friendship and the chance encounters whose values we often fail to recognize.
Director/Screenwriter: Mehrnoush Alia
Cast: Mirsaeed Molavian, Mojde Daie, Ebrahim Azizi
Digital, color, in Persian with English subtitles,17 min.
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Event Details
| Event Starts | 04/29/2023 |
| Event Ends | 05/14/2023 |
| Individual Price | Free Event - Registration Required |
| Location | Billy Wilder Theater - Hammer Museum |
