Film Magazine's Best Iranian Films

An urban guerrilla, wounded after a bank robbery, seeks refuge with his childhood friend—only to discover that his friend has fallen into addiction. The guerrilla hides in his house and gradually begins to influence him, helping him regain his courage and strength. Eventually, he entrusts the stolen money to him…

An Iranian boy is lost after fleeing home for his life; his family has been killed during the Iran-Iraq war. He's saved and trained by a middle-aged woman.

The mysterious disappearance of a kindergarten teacher during a picnic in the north of Iran is followed by a series of misadventures for her fellow travelers.

Desiderium lyrically charts the hapless loves of a three brother: Majid, they young handicapped brother with a deformed head falls in love with Aghdas, a prostitute hired by his eldest brother Habib to entertain him, not knowing the truth about her profession. Karim, the middle brother is so infatuated with a quail that he almost completely igno...

Hamoon's wife is leaving him. He is also unsuccessfully trying to finish his Ph.D. thesis. He is forced to reexamine his life. In a series of flashbacks and dreams, Hamoon tries to figure out what he did wrong.

An old villager deeply in love with his cow goes to the capital for a while. While he's there, the cow dies and now the villagers are afraid of his possible reaction to it when he returns.

Captain Khorshid is a sailor who although only having one hand, manages to sail his little boat. In his village, due to its hot climate and hard living conditions, dangerous criminals are sent into exile. They want to escape from the area, so they ask a middleman to strike a deal with Khorshid. Khorshid is asked to illegally take them out of the...

After getting involved in a brawl with three brothers, Ali accidently kills one of them and runs for his life.

A young man's drive to avenge for his sister and brother.

An aging colonel retires, marries a provincial teacher, and moves to Tehran to be close to his two adult daughters. Instead of a peaceful reunion, he finds them living independent, urban lives he no longer recognizes. As the cultural and generational rift deepens, the family enters a tense, psychological spiral of alienation and emotional unrest.

The film follows a character known as The Cinematographer, who is looking for someone called Atieh (Future). As he calls out to her, he is magically transported back in time from the early twentieth century to the reign of Naser al-Din Shah in 19th century Iran. Captured by the Shah's guards, he shows films from the history of Iranian cinema to ...

Recently have been released from jail, Ebi makes a bet with his Friend that he goes and drinks in seven bars without even paying any money.

A girl has heart disease and looks for a heart transplant.

Hashem is a cab driver who finds an infant child in the back seat of his cab one night after he gives a ride to a young woman. Hashem and his girlfriend, Taji, try to cope with this unwanted child. Hashem insists on getting rid of the child, Taji on keeping him.

An 8 year old boy must return his friend's notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.

A young orphan named Amiro lives alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan. He survives by shining shoes, selling water, and collecting deposit bottles. Although he sometimes finds himself at odds with both adults and competing older kids, he finds solace in dreams about departing cargo ships and airplanes—and by running.

When he takes a job as a schoolteacher in a new neighborhood, the hapless intellectual Mr. Hekmati finds that he is a fish out of water.

A satirical comedy about the oddball inhabitants of a Tehran apartment building and their landlord.

This film tells the story of a semi modern Iranian couple, who are trying to fight the old beliefs and old generation. This is a failing battle because the man is not strong enough.

A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task ...

The movie focuses on one of the events in Zendegi Edame Darad (1992), and explores the relationship between the movie director, and the actors. The local actors play a couple who got married right after the earthquake. In reality, the actor is trying to persuade the actress that they should get married.

When his business partner is hurt in a car accident, happily married Mahmoud (Fariborz Arabnia) must travel to Tehran, where he falls for the beautiful Sima (Hedye Tehrani). The two agree to a "temporary marriage," but problems arise when Sima doesn't want the arrangement to end. Sima's reluctance to play her expected role in this common Islamic...

An armed veteran of the Iran-Iraq War takes hostages at a travel agency after failing to raise enough money for his injured comrade to travel abroad for medical treatment.

Kamran and Moluk, middle-aged siblings, live penniless in the family's Tehran mansion, selling furniture to pay expenses. Their brother, who owns the house, has died suddenly, and his widow, Forugh, is coming from the provinces to visit. Kamran writes an elaborate script and hires a troupe of five actors to be the household servants. The purpose...

Mahmoud is suffering from writer's block and he is unable to continue the book he is currently working upon. He decides to take a break from his routine life and plans to visit his family's rural estate that is situated at north of Tehran. He also intends to complete his book in this visit. While at the estate, Mahmoud's attention is brought to ...

A railway crossing guard and his wife live in a routine of total isolation and uneventfulness.

A tax collector is accused of taking bribes, and also has to deal with problems at home.

The film progresses along two distinct but interwoven series of events. The first series involves young members of a family who have gathered round their old mother and revive their common childhood memories. the second line focuses on the old woman's preparations for her last journey and her joyous cooperation in arranging for the ceremonies th...

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

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 was discovered in a mill, but the cause of his death—and the whereabouts of his remains—are unknown.

Ali and his father go from their poor neighborhood in the outskirts of the city to a hospital so that Ali's father can be treated for his sickness. However since they have no money, Ali starts to work for Dr. Sameri who deals in blood.

Vahid is making a movie about the war. He invites a musician friend of himself Ali to compose a theme music for this film. But Ali can not make his mind. So they go to visit the real places...

This is about two guys who are departed from their family in totally different ways, they are anti social and try to live in a large city without any money, one of them fall in love and another one got addicted.

Prince Ehtejab, one of the last remaining heirs of the Qajar royal family, is suffering from tuberculosis, which he knows is fatal. He spends his last days alone in the magnificent rooms of his wintry palace, from where he recollects the glory days of his ancestors as well as days of degradation. Among the latter are the gruesome manner in which...

Famed actress Susan Taslimi plays three roles here: Kian, who doubts her identity; Vida, the twin sister, a self-assured artist; and their mother, who gives up one child out of fear of poverty, then deprives the other of affection because she deeply regrets the child whom she has abandoned.

The story of a ten years old Iranian schoolboy living with his mother and his father in Northern coasts of Iran. The boy helps his father in selling the latter's illegal fishing and helps his mother in shopping for her and bringing home water from a well. The three characters live together in only one room. Their life is austere. The boy eats on...

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.

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 women, out of jealousy, expose her, she also ends her life. Her husband buries her body in the aband...

Dash Akol is greatly respected in Shiraz as an honorable man who has lost his family's money through helping his friends. He has an enemy, however, named Kaka Rostam, a mean and spiteful person. Dash Akol, who is in his forties, falls in love with Marjan, daughter of the late Haji Samad, for whose estate he is the executor. But he keeps his love...

Various women struggle to function in the oppressively sexist society of contemporary Iran.

Reza, the veteran worker of a print house whose sight is adversely affected because of his job, loses his mother. Finding the gloom reigning over the home beyond bearing, he departs to overcome his sorrows. He ends up at a hostel where he shares his room with a southern guy called Ahmad who has a group of orphan war-stricken children under his w...

Adapted from a story in 1001 Nights, the story concerns the death of an actor and the comical incidents that occur as different people come into possession of, and attempt to dispose of, his body.

A director of a television series on the history of cinema, who has been grappling with the screenplay of his first feature film, receives an assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in a remote region of Zahedan province. He has already hired Turkmen tribespeople for his film and selected his filming location. Meanwh...

Hajji Hossein-Gholi Noori (Haji Baba) goes to Washington D.C. as the first Iranian (Persian) ambassador to the United States of America. After he opens the embassy, he is unable to invite statesmen to visit him. Haji fires the embassy staff due to the inability of the Persian government to meet the embassy's needs. One night he is visited by Pre...

A young teenager returns home after an absence to find his village in Iran deserted because of an incredibly severe drought. He begins a search to find his family, traveling through an amazingly bleak and desolate landscape. Primarily an essay on the issue of humans vs. nature, the film is of interest for technical and cultural reasons.

Ali Hatami's film on the life of Iranian wrestling champion Takhti remains unfinished. Another director is assigned by the I.R. Intelligence Ministry to finish the project. The new director wants to carry out research on the life of the champion, and it would seem that he will have to solve numerous problems before he can finish the job.

Rouhi, a young bride-to-be, is hired as a maid for an affluent family in Tehran. Upon arriving, she is suddenly thrust into an explosive domestic conflict. The wife is convinced her husband is having an affair and enlists Rouhi as a spy, to follow her husband, and confirm her suspicions. What Rouhi discovers, however, threatens not only their ma...

An uproarious adoption of a popular novel by Iraj Pezeshkzad set in and around the family compound in early 1940s Tehran, marvelously rich in personality and incident. The title character, so-called because of his constant invocation of the general, rules over a wonderfully complex extended family. A hilarious series which makes fun of just abou...

Set on the southern coast of Iran, "Harmonica" begins as a young boy receives a musical present from abroad. Fascinated and envious, his friends make him the leader of the pack, as they compete for the privilege of holding the harmonica or even blowing a few notes, until the games and horseplay begin to take on a sinister edge.

After being released from prison, Morteza discovers that his fiancée, Mehri, has been married off to a moneylender. Mehri’s husband promises to divorce her in exchange for money. Morteza, together with a man named Karim, steals a fortune from drug traffickers and goes into hiding in the sugarcane fields...