Movies: Iran

On stage since she was a toddler, Googoosh has been an icon of Iranian pop culture since the 1970s. Her progressive style and raw singing talent attracted worldwide acclaim and saw her performing alongside the likes of Tina Turner and Ray Charles. Bu...

A satirical take on the mundane absurdities of life in modern-day Iran, these nine vignettes illuminate the lighter side of enduring under authoritarian rule. Whether choosing a name for a newborn, graduating from grade school, getting a driver’s lic...

Russia, China and Iran: three former empires are determined to take their revenge and reassert their power after centuries of humiliation. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, they have never been so aligned on the international stage. Their common...

The Other Side of Burka is a 2004 Iranian documentary directed by Mehrdad Oskouei. In the southern island of Qeshm, Iran, which is a very strict region in point of tradition and African-Arabic rules, all women are under the pressure of patriarch soci...

Forough is a middle aged woman whose husband has temporarily married with another woman. Even though that was kept secret from her, but his action is considered legal in Iran. Now the husband is in prison, due to not being able to pay second wife’s “...

Against the tumultuous backdrop of Iran's 1953 CIA-backed coup d'état, the destinies of four women converge in a beautiful orchard garden, where they find independence, solace and companionship....

Yahya is a middle-aged man who lives in a small town, a place where he can hide and forget his past, connected to the repression in Iran. One day, his son Nima leaves the house and disappears. Gradually, he distanced himself from Marta, his lover, an...

A young woman's wedding becomes a ritual of mourning when her sister and family die in an auto accident on the way to the wedding. The sisters' mother refuses to accept her daughter's death, and in the midst of wedding guests and mourners, including ...

Wounded by the police, a thief looks up his old friend in order to leave the proceeds of his theft with him. Instead, he finds that his friend is a drug addict. He sticks around to try and help his friend kick the habit; instead, both men are caught ...

Bitter Rivals illuminates the essential history - and profound ripple effect - of Iran and Saudi Arabia's power struggle. It draws on scores of interviews with political, religious and military leaders, militia commanders, diplomats, and policy exper...

Bahram Beyzai's poetic imagining of the circumstances that led to the death of Yazdgerd III, the last of the Sassanid kings of Iran. His death in 651, during the Arab invasions that brought Islam to this Zoroastrian realm, was mysterious: his corpse ...

An Iranian family survives the shah and the ayatollah and moves to France. This story follows the family through it all. Despite the politics, revolution, prison, beatings, assassinations and suicides this is a comedy....

Rahmat travels to a host of islands in a vast salt pan in order to collect the inhabitant's tears for an unknown purpose. He is joined on his mysterious journey by a young boy searching for his father. As their travel nears its end, a potent critique...

A female election agent and a gun-toting soldier try to collect votes among the local islanders with mixed success....

The eight-year Iran-Iraq War was one of the most brutal conflicts to devastate the region in the 20th century. Zahed was 13 years old when he enrolled in the Iranian army. Najah was 18 when he was conscripted into the Iraqi army, and he fought agains...

A man who has fallen in love with a young woman discovers that she is the wife of his friend. When he realizes the woman's affection for a young libertine with whom she is secretly meeting in an abandoned house, he commits suicide. When the local wom...

An experimental film about narrations of two journal photos from Iran's revolution in 1979....

The satirical commentary on clergymen in post-revolutionary Iran. While in prison, petty criminal Reza (Parviz Parastui) comes across a clergyman, sparking a plan for escape. Reza dons his new acquaintance's clerical robes and makes a bid for freedom...

On June 20, 2009, Neda Agha-Soltan was shot and killed on the streets of Tehran during the turmoil that followed the Iranian presidential contest. Within hours, images of her dying moments, captured on cell phones, appeared on computer screens across...

Amir, a young Iranian, signs on with a fisherman on the rugged Caspian Sea coast in order to earn the money he needs to marry his sweetheart, Narges. But in so doing, he becomes entangled in the criminal machinations of caviar poaching. Piece by piec...