Iran
The story opens in Balochistan, in a small, scarcely ‘wired’ village bordering Iran and Afghanistan. Ahmad is an idealistic teacher in exile, educating the local community; his partner Niloofar, however, has spent time in jail in Tehran for the very same offence against the State. The disaccord between them is not only social but also personal. Ahmad’s destiny collides with that of a family fleeing the Taliban; soon the intricate divisions of age and gender within that group will trigger other problems and entanglements – including a ‘lovers on the run’ intrigue that fleetingly recalls Murnau’s classic Tabu (1931).
After his mother’s untimely death, Amir, who sees his father as the only one responsible for their ruined life, is desperate to leave the family home and take Ali, his younger brother. Taking advantage of his connections with Tehran’s golden youth, he embarks on a lucrative business. But one night, a simple delivery turns into chaos and upsets the destiny of the two brothers.
After a confusing interaction in downtown Tehran, a married couple seems to have found their doppelgängers.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has been barred from leaving the country, arrives at a village on the Iran-Turkey border to supervise a film based on a real-life couple seeking passports to Europe being shot in Turkey, but both his stay and the production run into trouble.
When Reza is jailed on drug charges under mysterious circumstances, his wife is forced to uproot the lives of their four children. Under Iran’s strict drug laws, Reza faces execution if convicted—a harsh sentence made harsher still by the overwhelming economic and emotional toll it takes on his family. With the future uncertain and nowhere to go, Reza’s family members find themselves at the mercy of actions taken far out of their control.
Shakib is a homeless day laborer who never got over the loss of his wife and son in an earthquake years ago. Over the last couple of years, he has developed a relationship with a deaf and mute woman, Ladan. The construction site on which he works today turns out to be the set of a film about the atrocities committed by Hitler during WWII. Against all odds, he is given a movie role, a house and a chance at being somebody. When Ladan learns about this, she comes to his workplace begging for help. Shakib’s scheme to hide her goes tragically wrong and threatens to ruin his newfound status and what seemed to be the opportunity of a lifetime.
At the age of 40, Leila has spent her entire life caring for her parents and four brothers. A family that is constantly arguing and under pressure from various debts in the face of sanctions against Iran. While her brothers are struggling to make ends meet, Leila makes a plan.
During the uprising to overthrow the Shah’s regime in Iran, protestors set fire to movie theatres to protest Western culture. Forty years later, four people decide to re-create the past by burning down a theatre.
A chaotic family is on a road trip across a rugged landscape. In the back seat, Dad has a broken leg, Mom tries to laugh when she’s not holding back tears, and the youngest keeps exploding into car karaoke. Only the older brother is quiet.
Rahim is in prison because of a debt he was unable to repay. During a two-day leave, he tries to convince his creditor to withdraw his complaint against the payment of part of the sum. But things don’t go as planned. Is he truly a hero?
Criminals have surrounded the home of a young Kurdish family. They only have one bullet left to defend themselves. At the same time their daughter is suffering from a chronic health condition which keeps on getting worse.
The Night is a psychological thriller that follows an Iranian couple, Babak and Neda, and their one-year-old daughter, Shabnam. Returning home from a friend’s gathering, Babak drives drunkenly, too stubborn to let Neda drive with a suspended license. When Babak’s driving threatens the safety of the family, Neda insists they stay the night at a hotel. Once they check-in, Babak and Neda find themselves imprisoned, forced to face the secrets they’ve kept from each other. And though the clock moves forward, “the night” never ends.
Two Iranian teenagers in love want to get married, travel to the US to get a green card and live there, but their parents object. With not enough money saved, they pin their hopes on winning the state lottery to fund their trip, but tragedy derails their plans.
A wealthy Iranian family struggles to contain a teenager’s growing sexual rebellion and her brother’s newfound conservatism.
Tucker and Hamid are going to be grandfathers for the first time, but only if they can come together long enough to save their first-born grandchild.
Since women are banned from soccer matches, Iranian females masquerade as males so they can slip into Tehran’s stadium to see the game between Iran and Bahrain. The ones who are caught and arrested are taken to a holding area and guarded by soldiers. One sympathetic soldier agrees to watch the game through a peephole and recount the action to the impatient fans.
Taking more than six years to complete, The Cut is a feature-length documentary that conclusively proves that female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM) can be found as a native practice on all inhabitable continents. From war zones in the Middle-East to bucolic Middle America, the film visits 14 countries and features key interviews with FGM survivors, activists, cutters, doctors and researchers to uncover an often secret practice shrouded in centuries of traditions, mysticisms and irrationalities.
Kaveh Nariman is a Doctor in the medical examiner’s office. One day at his work he meets a corpse which is very familiar to him.
A married couple are faced with a difficult decision – to improve the life of their child by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer’s disease.
After four years apart, Ahmad returns to his wife Marie in Paris in order to progress their divorce. During his brief stay, he cannot help noticing the strained relationship between Marie and her daughter Lucie. As he attempts to improve matters between mother and daughter Ahmad unwittingly lifts the lid on a long buried secret…
An elderly couple go about their routine of cleaning their gabbeh (a intricately-designed rug), while bickering gently with each other. Magically, a young woman appears, helping the two clean the rug. This young woman belongs to the clan whose history is depicted in the design of the gabbeh, and the rug recounts the story of the courtship of the young woman by a stranger from the clan.
Fa Mulan gets the surprise of her young life when her love, Captain Li Shang asks for her hand in marriage. Before the two can have their happily ever after, the Emperor assigns them a secret mission, to escort three princesses to Chang’an, China. Mushu is determined to drive a wedge between the couple after he learns that he will lose his guardian job if Mulan marries into the Li family.
Orson Welles’ final film documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.
A yellow cab is driving through the vibrant and colourful streets of Tehran. Very diverse passengers enter the taxi, each candidly expressing their views while being interviewed by the driver who is no one else but the director Jafar Panahi himself. His camera placed on the dashboard of his mobile film studio captures the spirit of Iranian society through this comedic and dramatic drive…
On the day before their holiday trip to Dubai, a wife who believes her husband is unfaithful enlists the help of Roohi, a young woman sent by an agency to clean the house. She asks Roohi to make an appointment and gather information at the salon of the woman she suspects. Roohi is betrothed, innocent of marital discord. Over the course of the day, she, the couple, their small son, the wife’s sister and husband, and the beautician engage in a series of exchanges, confrontations, and prevarications. Are the wife’s suspicions unwarranted; is her behavior imperiling her marriage? Acts of kindness may go awry. And the trip to Dubai?
Forced out of their apartment due to dangerous works on a neighboring building, Emad and Rana move into a new flat in the center of Tehran. An incident linked to the previous tenant will dramatically change the young couple’s life.
Akbar has just turned eighteen. He has been held in a rehabilitation centre for committing murder at the age of sixteen when he was condemned to death. Legally speaking, he had to reach the age of eighteen so that the conviction could be carried out. Now, Akbar is transferred to prison to await the day of his execution. A’la, a friend of Akbar, who himself has undergone imprisonment for burglary, soon after his release tries desperately to gain the consent of Akbar’s plaintiff so as to stop the execution
According to the police, Negar’s father committed suicide. Having had a happy life, Negar suspects that his death has not happened the way it seems. She starts unfolding the truth through an unconventional investigation.
Zohre’s shoes are gone; her older brother Ali lost them. They are poor, there are no shoes for Zohre until they come up with an idea: they will share one pair of shoes, Ali’s. School awaits…
A politically complacent middle-aged man and a young pro-democracy activist debate about the future of their country while hiding from the police, in this fascinating drama that blends scripted scenes with on-the-ground footage from Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution.
Teenager Amir is constantly dodging trouble while dealing drugs in the underbelly of Mumbai. Following a drug bust, he evades the cops and ends up on the doorstep of his estranged sister Tara. Complications from concealing Amir land Tara in jail, but she still sees her brother as her only hope of living in the outside world again. While their lives have been darkened by despair, hope may shine from beyond the clouds.
Khorshid lives with his mom in a house near a river somewhere in Tajikistan. Th landlord comes around every morning to ask for the rent. Khorshid has to provide the money or else they’ll have to leave. His blindness has given him an amazing skill in tuning musical instruments which gets him a job at an instrument making workshop. But the problem is That Khorshid is mesmerized by sonorous music all the time; whenever he hears a great musician play, he loses track of time and place. For this, he always gets lost and gets to work late. How is he going to make a balance between his love of music and his task as a breadwinner?
We are taken care of when we are children and we do not know as much as when we are older. There is less to worry about. But it does not mean the things that are important to us as children have less significance. You see, for Scruffy, despite that she is from a poor family of the countryside, it is very important to study well, because she will become an asthma doctor. The doctor said her dad will die but she has decided – she will grow up and cure her father. Equally important is to run away from her grandmother, who almost always is lurking around in the dark corners of the house with a comb to fix her messy hair. Death is too abstract to understand, war is a word one hears on the radio that grownups sometimes listen to. Yet, as Scruffy lives through her days full of happiness and misery at full steam, the most tumultuous years of Iran become unveiled on the background, as we are introduced to the Revolution and the Iran-Iraqi war through the eyes of a child.
