Kanopy (Firm)
Language
Persian
Description
Mitra Farahani’s lyrical documentary explores the enigma of provocative artist Bahman Mohassess, the so-called “Persian Picasso,” whose acclaimed paintings and sculptures dominated pre-revolutionary Iran. Irreverent and uncompromising, a gay man in a hostile world, Mohassess had a conflicted relationship with his homeland—revered by elites in the art scene and praised as a national icon, only to be censored later by an oppressive regime. Known...
Language
Persian
Description
Mehrdad Oskouei’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Starless Dreams (2016), SUNLESS SHADOWS takes another look at the lives of teenage girls in an Iranian juvenile detention center. But this time the focus is narrowed: each of the film’s principal subjects is serving time for the murder of a male family member. One by one, Oskouei invites them to go into a room alone, push the red button on the camera and address their accomplices or their...
Language
Persian
Description
A stark testimonial of the previously unseen and unheard, this documentary plunges us into the lives of young teenage girls sharing temporary quarters at a rehabilitation and correction center on the outskirts of Tehran. STARLESS DREAMS is an unforgettable cinematic portrayal of restored innocence and humanity. Winner of the Amnesty International Film Prize at the **Berlin International Film Festival.** Winner of the Best Documentary Award at the...
5) ABC Africa
Language
Persian
Description
Uganda, March 2000. At the request of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, Abbas Kiarostami and his assistant Seilollah Samadian arrive in Kampala. For ten days, their DV cameras capture and caress the faces of thousand children, all orphans, whose parents have died of AIDS. It records tears and laughter, music and silence, life and death. It attests to Africa’s sunny resilience to so much suffering and disease.
6) Painting
Language
Persian
Description
In the Skaramanga’s Refugee Camp Greece, a group of refugee children from Afghanistan at the age of 10-13 paint their experience and memories from the war and their journey to Europe. In this short documentary they describe through their drawings their city as they remember it, the city that they've found shelter in and the city that they wish to live in the future. Winner of an Audience Award at the **Thessaloniki Documenatary Film Festival**.
7) Beach Flags
Language
Persian
Description
Vida is a young Iranian lifeguard. Popular on her team, she is determined to fight inorder to be the one to participate in an international competition in Australia. However,when Sareh who is as fast and talented as her, joins the team, Vida will have to face anunexpected situation. Nominated for the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the **Sundance Film Festival**.
Language
Persian
Description
After five years of studying in Paris, Arash has struggled to adapt to life in France and has decided to return to Iran. In the hope of changing his mind, his two friends take him on one last trip across France. Official Selection at the **BFI London Film Festival**. *"Goormaghtigh reinvigorates the summertime road-trip genre with this lyrical, keenly observed, acutely political comedy." - Richard Brody, **New Yorker***
10) Tehran Taboo
Language
Persian
Description
In this gorgeously animated drama, the lives of several strong-willed women and a young musician intersect. Their stories reveal the hypocrisies of modern Iranian society, where sex, drugs, and corruption coexist with strict religious law. In the bustling metropolis of Tehran, avoiding prohibitions has become an everyday sport and breaking taboos can be a means of personal emancipation. Nevertheless, women invariably end up on the bottom rung of the...
12) Inversion
Language
Persian
Description
Tehran's air pollution has reached maximum levels because of thermal inversion. Unmarried 30- something Niloofar lives with her aged mother, and stays busy with her alterations shop. When doctors insist that her mother must leave smoggy Tehran for her respiratory health, Niloofar’s brother and family elders decide that she must also move away to accompany her mother. Niloofar is torn between family loyalty and living her own life and pursuing a...
13) Invasion
Language
Persian
Description
Director Shahram Mokri’s third and most formally challenging film continues the time-bending, single-shot experimentation of FISH & CAT (and later, CARELESS CRIME) in a science-fiction/detective/vampire story, with nods to stylized 1980s New Wave-era films like LIQUID SKY. Sometime in the future, teams of tattooed athletes play a vaguely defined sport in an ominous, labyrinthine stadium where a murder has taken place. When police try to reconstruct...
14) Iron Island
Language
Persian
Description
Some poor people in the Southern coasts of Iran do not have any place to live, and thus, they reside on an old, abandoned ship in the sea. Captain Nemat, their chief, tries to persuade the ship-owner and the official authorities not to get the ship back. On the other hand, he is selling the iron parts of the ship piece by piece. IRON ISLAND is the story of those whose ignorance makes them simply trust those who are always ready to abuse their trust....
15) Cold Sweat
Language
Persian
Description
Afrooz is the captain of the Iranian National Futsal Team, a women’s indoor soccer team. A long-held dream to play the Asian Games final is shattered when Afrooz’ husband imposes a travel restriction on her. Furious, Afrooz stands up against the patriarchal Iranian system. But will she win this battle?
Language
Persian
Description
Reza, having distanced himself from the urban quagmire, leads a simple life along with his wife and young son, in a remote village in Northern Iran. He spends his days working on his goldfish farm. Nearby, a private company with close links to the government, has taken control of nearly every aspect of regional life. Its shareholders, accumulating wealth, power and economic influence, have been pushing local farmers to sell off their farms, to the...
17) Disappearance
Language
Persian
Description
On a cold winter night in modern Tehran, a couple of young lovers run into a serious problem, and they have just a few hours to come up with a solution. They go from hospital to hospital in search for help, but none of the hospitals will admit the young woman to provide her with the medical attention she desperately requires. While they try to find a way to solve the problem, they have to hide what is happening from their parents. Moreover, their...
18) Ten
Language
Persian
Description
TEN sequences in the emotional lives of six women and the challenges that they face at one particular moment in those lives, that could just as easily be ten sequences in the emotional life of the one same woman…
19) Careless Crimes
Language
Persian
Description
Inspired by a real-life tragedy, the infamous Cinema Rex fire in 1978 that triggered the Iranian Revolution, CARELESS CRIME follows three “timelines” – of arsonists planning to burn down a movie theatre; of workers and students at the cinema; and of characters within the film screening at the cinema – which may or may not all be happening at the same time. One of the most dazzling and enigmatic films in recent memory, Mokri’s mind-bending...
Language
Persian
Description
Director Shahram Mokri’s first feature is a delightfully offbeat B&W comedy about the mysterious workings of Fate, played out in deadpan Jim Jarmusch-like vignettes. Two blind jewel thieves, a young man who can’t succeed at killing himself, a love-struck police officer and two female morgue attendants find their lives interconnected when an unusual fish is set free and a charmed ring is moved. Watch for sly references to film noir classics including...