As Iran Makes Headlines, Iranian Cinema Raises Its Standing

In Rome on the evening of April 4, as Iran was being pounded by U.S. and Israeli missiles, a large crowd celebrated the Persian new year in the Eternal City’s Alcazar club dancing to Middle East beats, including vintage Iranian tracks by iconic pop star Googosh who was incarcerated in Tehran during the early 1980s and now lives in L.A.

The itinerant event, called Disco Tehran – that also plays in New York, London and Berlin – is organised by Arya Ghavamian, a filmmaker who left Iran in 2008 and wound up in New York where, besides Disco Tehran, he co-founded Cinema Tehran that organizes Iranian film pop ups around the world.

“The main impetus of it is just finding community,” says Ghavamian, sipping a dry white wine at a sidewalk cafe in Rome’s hipster Pigneto neighbourhood. “The way I look at these parties, they are a place of resistance where some healing can take place, he adds, noting that roughly 40% of the crowd in Rome was made up of the Iranian diaspora. 

But what’s equally important to him is seeing non-Iranians dancing to Iranian music. “They don’t understand the language, but the music connects.”  

The same artistic philosophy applies to Cinema Tehran. It involves the rediscovery of films that Ghavamian never got a chance to watch in his home country because they were banned, and bringing them to movie theatres globally.

Iranian cinema classics are a hot cinematic commodity these days in the indie trenches.

In New York in February – with Iran in the headlines due to thousands of students being killed by Iranian security forces while calling for the Islamic regime to be overthrown – Ghavamian was busy introducing screenings at New York’s Metrograph movie theatre of a retrospective titled “Travel Companions: Bahram Beyzaie and Amir Naderi.” 

It comprises the restored print of the recently deceased Beyzaie’s 1984 masterpiece “Bashu: the Little Stranger” and also Naderi’s autobiographical drama “The Runner,” about an 11-year-old scavenging garbage heaps in Tehran during the escalating Iran-Iraq War. 

“Bashu,” which is widely considered among the greatest Iranian movies ever made, also takes place during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s. The moving drama revolves on a young boy, the film’s titular character, who escapes the bombing of his southern Iranian village in which his family is killed. He travels north where a mother of two, whose husband is away, takes Bashu in, defying suspicions of the surrounding villagers.

“These films establish a history that places a lot of the events that we’re witnessing right now into perspective,” says Metrograph programmer Edo Choi. 

Frédérique Rouault, who is head of collections at French company MK2 that is selling the fresh “Bashu” print, said that after Beyzaie’s passing in December “we got tons of requests from festivals, cinemas and universities in the U.S. and Canada who wanted to program tribute screenings. Then, after the acceleration of the conflict in Iran, “we started adding more requests from all around the world.” 

The newly restored “Bashu” print, which scooped the prize for best restored film at the 2025 Venice Film Festival – where it launched in the Venice Classics section – is now set to play theatrically across North America via indie distributor Film Movement in the U.S. and Montreal-based Ritual in Canada. MK2 also sold the restored “Bashu” to Trigon for theatrical release in Germany and is planning a Beyzaie tribute in French cinemas.

“It’s not like Americans are more curious about Iranian culture because we’ve been dropping bombs on them,” said Film Movement chief Micheal Rosenberg. “But there is certainly a big audience right now for “Bashu” in North America,” he points out.

“The U.S.-Israel war on Iran is kind of a reminder that ‘Bashu’ is a political film,” said Ritual co-founder William Gagnon. “We find the gesture of putting it out theatrically a way to speak about the present.”

In Cannes MK2 will be unveiling a new Abbas Kiarostami tribute package to buyers, marking the 10th year anniversary of the death of the revered Iranian auteur who won the 1997 Palme d’Or with “Taste of Cherry.”

At Venice last September exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof (“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”), who was a festival jury member, received the award for the restored ‘Bashu’ on Beyzaie’s behalf. “Many of us, directly or indirectly, learned from him. We learned how to stand against forgetting,” said Palme d’Or–winning auteur Jafar Panahi (“It Was Just an Accident”) upon  Beyzaie’s death in December. Two-time Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi noted how “bitter” it was “that this most Iranian of Iranians died thousands of miles away from Iran.”

Rasoulof, who escaped to Germany in May 2024 after receiving a jail and flogging sentence from Iranian authorities for making “Sacred Fig” — which won the special jury prize at Cannes — has been the first major Iranian director to publicly speak out on the U.S. and Israel attack on Iran. In March in an impassioned social media post Rasoulof commented the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by calling him “the most hated figure in the contemporary history of Iran.”

Panahi, meanwhile, in April reportedly returned to his beloved Iran after completing the U.S. Oscar campaign for “It Was Just An Accident,” despite the fact the he faces a one-year prison sentence in his home country.

Farhadi, who has been living outside Iran since 2023 – he left shortly before protests following the death of Mahsa Amini erupted in his home country, and did not return – is soon expected on the Cannes red carpet with his new film, the Paris-set “Parallel Tales” starring a top notch French cast including Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel and Catherine Deneuve that is competing for the Palm d’Or. 

Shortly before the April 8 ceasefire – when airstrikes against Iran were at their peak after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened that if a deal wasn’t reached “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” – Farhadi launched an appeal to the U.S. and Israel to stop bombing “Infrastructure that belongs to the Iranian people and is related to the basic needs of their daily lives.”

Besides “Parallel Tales,” another Iranian film will soon be bowing in Cannes, “Rehersals for a Revolution” by London-based Iranian director Pegah Ahangarani. Drawing from her personal archives, home videos, street protests footage, and newspapers, it retraces more than 40 years of Iran’s history from the early days of the country’s current Islamic theocracy up until the 2026 war. The materials provide a portrait of a nation shaped by political repression “and in constant hope for a new revolution,” as the doc’s synopsis puts it.

“Our country’s recent history is made up of failed revolutions,” Ahangarani tells Variety. “But I’m absolutely sure that to stand up and get rid of dictatorship, we have to process what we’ve been through.”

The Iranian film community, as well as the rest of the world, certainly have a lot to process. Prospects for Iran appear even more uncertain now than they were before the country came under the U.S. and Israel attack.

But one thing does seem clear to the country’s artistic community.

“Wars have never solved problems,” Iranian multi-hyphenate Babak Karimi – who played the judge in Farhadi’s “A Separation” – told Variety in Rome, shortly after fleeing wartime bombing in Tehran by crossing Iran’s border with Armenia.

“They just pass them on to the next generation.”