Iranian Cinema: Celluloid Underground (2023)

Please note: registration does not guarantee entry if the event reach capacity. Admission is granted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Patrons who have registered will need to obtain their free tickets at the box office, where seating will be assigned. Any seats remaining 15 minutes before showtime will be released to standby patrons.

U.K., 2024

An award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at Cannes, Locarno, the New York Film Festival and other international festivals, Maryam Tafakory constructs spellbinding assemblages of archive film footage and original imagery to “dissect veiled acts of erasure — of bodies, intimacies, and histories.” Her latest work is an homage to Zan, an Iranian women’s newspaper published in the 1990s, through reader letters, scenes from classic Iranian films and the reveries of two school girls inspired by its pages to seize the power of their own representations.

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 27 min. Director: Maryam Tafakory.

U.K./Iran, 2023

Growing up in Iran, London-based director Ehsan Khoshbakht discovered his love for the movies in a country where they were forbidden. Not content to watch films alone, he started a film club that put him in the sights of the authorities but also brought him into contact with a mysterious film collector who, he learns, rescued hundreds of film prints from the hands of the government after the revolution. Part cinema history, part memoir, part mediation on place, identity and the passions that can sustain one through exile, Khoshbakht weaves multiple intersecting lines of inquiry in this always fascinating film essay.

DCP, color, in English and Persian with English subtitles, 80 min. Director: Ehsan Khoshbakht.

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