This award-winning debut feature from Sundance is an empathetic take on the anxieties over identity and belonging as Afghan refugees hope to start a new life in Iran.
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This award-winning debut feature from Sundance is an empathetic take on the anxieties over identity and belonging as Afghan refugees hope to start a new life in Iran.
This Locarno Golden Leopard winner with some fascinating use of sound and camera is boldly conceived if occasionally uneven, shot clandestinely in Tehran as a driver heavily reliant on GPS finds existential purpose in healing people with drugs.
Beguiling if also bewildering, this newly-restored pre-’79 Iranian rarity is ultimately elusive and muddling in its thematic exploration of paranoia, traditions and taboos, as a mysterious wounded man drifts ashore on a boat.
An Iranian doppelganger thriller exploring themes of identity and anxiety that is bursting with tense, moody atmosphere as a married couple encounters another couple that looks just like them.
You would expect no less than a meta-filmic experience from Panahi where he slyly—and sometimes angrily—comments on the shackles of traditions and laws in relation to freedom, but for once he overreaches with his creative approach.
A revelatory feature debut by Ghobadi, whose work with child actors and eye for natural landscapes is remarkable, telling a story of perseverance amid desperation set near the porous if dangerous Iran-Iraq border.
Tonally uneven and tries too hard to be captivating, Panah Panahi’s tragicomic debut feature is a mixed bag of a road movie, despite the picturesque cinematography and some genuine moments of human empathy.
A Best Director winner at the Berlinale, Farhadi weaves a complex web of human relationships that become incredibly strained when a young woman mysteriously disappears in this riotous if unsettling drama.
Women seem to know the answer to men’s problems in this superlative suspenseful drama from Farhadi, as suspected infidelity threatens to ruin the lives of a married couple.
Farhadi’s second feature is, in hindsight, a companion piece to A Hero—while it lacks the nuance of his later works, one can already witness his penchant for telling intricately-plotted dramas about morality.