Iran

Profile: Asghar Farhadi - Director of A Separation

Story of couple who split up over decision to leave Iran

17 Jun 2011

Name Asghar Farhadi Born Isfahan, Iran, 1972 Background Farhadi embarked on filmmaking while still at school, where he made Super 8 and 16mm films as part of the Iranian Young Cinema Society. He went on to graduate from Tehran University…

Frontier Blues

7 Sep 2010

(12A) 97min British-Iranian director Babak Jalali captures the absurdist details and quiet tragedies of life in a remote Iranian border town in his debut feature Frontier Blues. Through long, static shots and slow-pacing, Jalali details the lives…

Poland 3 Iran 2

Merhdad and Chris share the political football

9 Aug 2010

Iran’s narrow defeat at the hands of Poland in the 1978 World Cup serves more as punctuation than as the main text of this lecture-cum-barroom shaggy dog story. Lecture because its main visual element is a slideshow; barroom tale because it’s told in a…

No One Knows About Persian Cats

23 Jul 2010

(12) 106min (Network) Gifted and celebrated Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly) threw caution to the wind and hung his reputation on the line in the making of this freewheeling semi-documentary about…

Women Without Men

2 Jul 2010

Director Sherin Neshat made her name as an artist, mainly in the area of photography, who carefully exploited Islamic gender issues. Women Without Men, her cinematic debut, started life as a visual installation, and the finished product places Neshat…

Shirin

23 Jul 2009

Revered Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami’s latest work stages a dramatic re-telling of the 12th century legend of Shirin and Khosrow. It’s a tragic and brutal tale of female self-sacrifice, but here’s the rub: the central attraction is missing.

Persepolis - An interview with Marjane Satrapi

24 Apr 2008

Sitting across from me in a tartan-walled basement of a London hotel room, Marjane Satrapi cuts an imposing figure. Arms folded, with an all-black outfit reflecting her mood, the Iranian-born 38-year-old is in town to discuss Persepolis, her…

Persepolis

24 Apr 2008

ANIMATION (12A) 96min Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical coming-of-age graphic novel Persepolis has been expertly adapted to screen by the author and graphic artist Vincent Paronnaud. The dubbed English language version features the voices of…

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis

10 Apr 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Vintage) In advance of the Persepolis feature-length animation to be released at cinemas at the end of this month (25 April if you want to note it in your diary) comes this welcome two-in-one paperback edition of Satrapi’s seminal…

It's Winter

(12A) 81min

26 Mar 2007

DRAMA The Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz once suggested that all modern Arabic literature (including his own) was ‘fourth or fifth rate’, proposing that non-first world countries, countries which aren’t advanced industrial nations, were generally…