A transparent look into the life of Iranian immigrants in America. Sholeh and her husband Nasser carry out their evening routine in a ritual they are both accustomed to but nonetheless deeply grateful for.
Social & External
Sholeh
Nasser
A Japanese man and a gay bar-owner in Hong Kong drink beer as they talk about their childhood and experiences.
A 15-year-old Somalian boy meets a 40-year-old Iranian man in a refugee camp in Skåne, in the south of Sweden. With the threat of deportation hanging over them, they decide to take their faiths in their own hands and together they go on a journey in the Swedish summer.
Eight months after the Chernobyl disaster, a Chernobylite woman that stayed behind to care for her sick mother gives birth to a mutated daughter. She wakes up after giving birth to find her mother gone. Masha, isolated and suffering from cataracts from the radiation exposure, becomes fearful that soldiers will take her contaminated baby. While attempting to reunite with her family in Kiev, the blinding mother and infant become lost in a forest. Masha sees a figure chasing her and believes it's a soldier that wants her child.
The life of a young computer systems analyst is thrown into turmoil after arriving in Istanbul to start a new job. She soon finds her passport missing, her credit cards useless, her bank account empty and her identity stolen. As the story progresses we find people and events may not be what they seem.
Claudia Recher is a young woman who has lived a horrible situation. Her sense of reality becomes an illusion as she struggles to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked life. The last witness of innocence and her internal conflicts.
During a demonstration, with the assistance of a man named Manouchehr, Fereshteh succeeds to get rid of the security forces. After victory of the revolution, they accidentally meet each other and consequently get married despite disagreement of Fereshteh’s family. Coming back from the honeymoon, they are encountered with a new situation altering all the peoples’ lives. The men should go to the war front for defending their country after the invasion of Iraqi Army to Iran.
Four friends spend a final summer together tangled in a web of sexual obsession, alienation and magic.
A coming-of-age story about Jack, a 16-year old Iranian boy growing up in 1989 Los Angeles. With the 1979 Iranian Revolution a distant memory, the AIDS movement as a backdrop, and a haunting score by Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, Jack learns how to stage his own much smaller revolution within the confines of his traditional family.
A young wizard accidentally conjures a spell that puts her family in jeopardy.
Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Rakshan Banietemad ends her eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking with this ingenious, mosaic-like narrative, which knits together the stories of seven characters to create a microcosm of Iranian working-class society.
The renovation of a rambling family homestead becomes a metaphor for an unexpected assault on traditional family values when a newly married twenty-something brings her architect husband to draw up the plans for her aunt and uncle’s rehab job.
Two homicide detectives investigates the murder of a woman ...
THE BRIGHT DAY weaves a story that has its roots in the complexity of Iran’s draconian laws governing capital punishment. A kindergarten teacher hopes to aid the father of one of her young students, a man accused of manslaughter, by convincing each of seven reluctant witnesses to come forward. No one lacks a hidden agenda in this drama in which shades of truth collide with self-interest and the specter of payback. (Gene Siskel Film Center)
Ramón Sampedro is a ship mechanic and part-time poet left a quadriplegic following a diving accident. Ramón fought for 30 years for the legal right to end his own life. He develops close relationships with his long-term lawyer Julia and his friend Rosa, who tries to convince him that his life is worth living. Despite his situation, Ramón manages to inspire those around him to live life to the fullest.
A Tehran mullah-in-training struggles to take care of his ailing wife and their children in this profoundly moving melodrama. A film of near-universal appeal, it puts a human face on Iran's Muslim clergy with its unusual tale of a man forced by hardship to become a better husband and father. Seyed Reza has just moved with his family to Tehran so he can study the Koran, and he relies on his lovely wife Zahra to look after their two young children and weave the intricate rugs that earn them a living. But one evening Zahra collapses and is taken to the hospital, where she's diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Scarcely able to process the tragedy, Seyed is left to cook, change diapers, walk his daughter to school and take his toddler son with him to his classes, where peers and elders treat him with scorn. But Seyed eventually learns to cope, his prayers and devotional studies taking on deeper meaning as he attends to the hard nightly work of rug weaving, getting through with a heavy ...
A haughty acclaimed newly married fashion designer named Iraj is shown the door by his boss after the boss's son arrives at Iran to take over his father's company. Iraj reluctant to promulgate the loss of his job, starts using his savings, trying to conceal the truth from his naive wife. Having squandered all the money he had on trivial matters, he tells his wife about being axed & that's when the tables turn on him.
The story is about the world of a small family with familiar dreams and not so remarkable problems. The mother is trying to lead everything to save her family, but small events disarrange all her plans.
Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.
The uneasy relationship between a mother and daughter is made all the more turbulent by drug abuse in this downbeat drama from Iranian filmmakers Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab
Based on Rosario Castellanos' novel, Balún Canán is about the turmoil created by the Cardenas’ land reforms. Events occur in Chiapas on the border with Guatemala, mainly in a town called Comitán. Zoraida struggles and fights to keep her properties, inheritance for her only son. For her actions, the sorcerers of Chacjatal cast a death spell over her son.
A Hawaiian teenage surfer shows off his skills when he takes to the snow slopes in Vermont.
The lives of three strong-willed women and a young musician cross paths in Tehran’s schizophrenic society where sex, adultery, corruption, prostitution and drugs coexist with strict religious law. In this bustling modern metropolis, avoiding prohibition has become an everyday sport and breaking taboos can be a means of personal emancipation.
As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.
A young Amish woman, who isn't satisfied with her path at home, visits a cousin for the summer. Over the summer, she is exposed to another world, finds friendship and more. Soon she must choose and come to terms with the life she wants.
When a brilliant nine-year-old working in a sweatshop gets a chance to attend school, she must make a difficult choice for her and her sister's future.
As the Iranian revolution reaches a boiling point, a CIA 'exfiltration' specialist concocts a risky plan to free six Americans who have found shelter at the home of the Canadian ambassador.
A young teenage rapper must use his musical talent to help his friend out and win the girl of his dreams by going through several events of betrayal, trust and agreement while his religious parents have strictly dislike his interests.
A down-on-his-luck coach is hired to prepare a team of the best American dancers for an international tournament that attracts all the best crews from around the world, but the Americans haven't won in fifteen years.
Three men case a small town very carefully, with plans to rob the bank on the upcoming Saturday, which turns violent and deadly.
A spectacular heist starts to unravel as the crooks take it on the lam.
94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
Mohammad joyfully returns to his tiny village on summer vacation from the Institute for the Blind, unaware of his widowed father's intentions to disown him in order to win the hand—and dowry—of a local woman. With the wedding swiftly approaching, Mohammad's future hangs precariously in the balance as his father struggles against his destiny, unable to see the wonder of life and love that's so clear to his son.
“Snow gently falls on the blood-stained streets of a seedy out-of-time New York City. Steam envelopes the nightmare unfolding within its narrow alleys. Iron is the will of the one who would dare to resist… fight… survive.”
When hired killer John Gant rides into Lordsburg, the town's folk become paranoid as each leading citizen has enemies capable of using the services of a professional killer for personal revenge.
In this adaptation of the critically acclaimed debut novel by Iranian American author Dalia Sofer, a secular Jewish family is caught up in the maelstrom of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
A boozy lowlife tries to bury the truth about his crazy stepson's suspicious death, but a nosy newspaper columnist and the young man's mother complicate matters.
During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.
A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
Katy McLaughlin desires to work on her family's mountainside horse ranch, although her father insists she finish boarding school. Katy finds a mustang in the hills near her ranch. The headstrong 16 year old then sets her mind to tame a mustang and prove to her father she can run the ranch. But when tragedy happens, it will take all the love and strength the family can muster to restore hope.