Iran

Filmmaker Elahe Esmaili helps pack up their parents’ house. As the boxes pile up, intergenerational discussions also flare up: Elahe does not wear a hijab, embodying the courage of her generation. Esmaili longs for a deep, existential shift, driven by the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement that pervaded Iran.

In So Can I, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami combines live-action and animation. While two schoolboys watch animated animals (such as jumping kangaroos and swimming fish) on TV, one boy says, “I can do that too,” and then imitates the actions. Kiarostami’s son Ahmad plays the second, silent boy.

Recess is one of Abbas Kiarostami’s very first short films. We see a boy being punished at school for breaking a window. When he joins a group of schoolmates playing football, he disrupts the fun by stealing the ball and running away. Eventually, he drifts aimlessly along a busy highway.

Saleh Kashefi is an Iranian filmmaker who has taken refuge in Switzerland. He decides to attack Ali Khamanei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, out of a desire to “play a role” in the uprising in his native country because “he has affected every second of [his] life.”

Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay that questions the alleged innocence of handbags in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In doing so, Maryam Tafakory provides a robust political analysis of censorship and intimacy. 

Dream of Silk was banned from screening in Iran. In the film, Nahid Rezaei returns to the high school she attended as a young woman twenty years ago, to talk to the young students. She asks them about their hopes for the future and their vision of an ideal life.

Parviz Kimiavi is one of the most prominent figures of 20th-century Persian cinema. In his documentaries, he highlights various subjects in an often poetic and impressionistic way. In P Like Pelican, an old hermit in a slum wants to teach the alphabet to the street children who often come to play in his neighbourhood.

A portrait of a leper colony in the north of Iran, where 'ugliness' is juxtaposed with religion and gratitude.

A sensory insight into the life of an Iranian refugee. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, numerous Iranian intellectuals and artists had to flee their beloved country. Many of them settled in Paris and tried to build a new life, often without success.