The Documentary and Experimental Film Center

A review of the artistic and personal life of Masoud Kimiai and the analysis of five decades of filmmaking.

An old optician is going to close his optometry shop due to his weak eyesight. But there is still a client who has not referred to receive her spectacles yet.

An excellent study of authoritarianism. It has two equally important qualities: one is a deep respect for the victims and their suffering; the other is the courage to face the autocrat and give him every possibility to present and defend himself. That the dictator demonstrates no need for defense and is thus denying any guilt and responsibility is probably the key feature of authoritarianism. The brilliance by which the filmmaker makes this gradually visible is breathtaking.

Younes’s father is arrested when the sugar factory boss accuses him of setting fire to the fields. When 11-year-old Younes, preparing himself for a football trial, finds out that at the night of the accident, his father, as a leading figure in the strikes and the protests, was busy at a meeting with the other workers, talking about their demands, he tries to bring the witnesses to the court. It is the starting point of his journey: a journey of forgetting his love for football and taking the pressure off his family….

Mana is an eight-year-old girl whom Leila has adopted through an old woman because she could not have child. One day, Mana faints at school. Following medical investigations, they find out that she is HIV positive…

A portrait documentary about one of the most prominent pioneers of the Iranian modern cinema, Sohrab Shahid Saless. In 1969, a young man of 26 years of age returns to his country Iran after years of studying cinema and going through the hardship of living abroad as a university student. He does not want to become a filmmaker in the commercial and valueless cinema of that time, so he chooses a different and – of course – a very hard path for the making of his films. The result of the daring choice is the two features A Simple Event and Still Life, which are remembered today as the most important and most influential first examples of the formation of the Iranian modern cinema. The pioneer filmmaker is nobody but Sohrab Shahid Saless. But how he succeeded in the making of the unconventional films? And how are his films related to the vicissitude in his life?

This documentary follows the life of an 80-year-old mother named Firouzeh who is fond of her isolated lifestyle in nature with her cows. The film shows her kind and loving character and demonstrates her bravery and strength tackling the hardship of life in the Alborz mountains without the modern comforts of technology. She believes happiness lies in the simplicities of life.

Documentary about Babak Bayat (Persian: بابک بیات)(13 June 1946 – 26 November 2006). Babak Bayat was an Iranian songwriter and film score composer. He was repeatedly nominated for the Crystal Simorgh award in the field of the soundtrack at the Fajr Film Festival and received this award twice in 1991 and 1997.

A film about a muslim guy and his sex drive.

The eldest son of the family is dead. After the funeral ceremony, the guests have left the house and the family members are talking to each other.

In Turkmen language, Atlan means "mount a horse and depart". Horse is the most important element in the life of Iranian Turkmen. That's why courses are some of the most significant social events in their land, Turkmen Sahara. Turkmen Sahara is a region in north eastern Iran and is homeland to Iranian Turkmen. Ali is a Turkman with his life, like many of his peers', intertwined with courses. Now his wedding depends on his success in courses. This documentary film is about Iranian horses.

A young divorcee living with her son in a small northern city of Iran, wants to marry the man she has fallen in love with. According to the current rules, the father has the custody of children; however, her ex-husband has granted her that right on the condition that she doesn’t remarry. Struggling to keep both of her beloved ones, she has to think about the third option: Temporary Marriage (Sighe). However, this will get her into a predicament, as despite its being legal, Sighe is not well-received by the society at all. Would temporary marriage be a good solution for her?

The daily hardships of a war-scarred Bosnian village, where all that remains are widows and orphans, are painstakingly documented in this first feature from director Aida Begic. Snow offers insight about the psychological aftereffects of the 1992-95 civil war from a distinctively female point of view without showing any of the brutality or carnage.

Luba is a young Russian woman who, after coming to Iran which coincides with the Iran-Iraq war, her Iranian husband went to the front and she has not heard from her husband for three years.

In Iran, gender-affirming surgery is legal, though it carries with it great stigma, and is usually performed so that a gay couple may lead a heteronormal life. In this one-of-a-kind film, shot in secret in Iran, a father and husband finds his fragile world endangered when a man from his past appears claiming to be his daughter's true father. He never knew his wife was pregnant when she sought a divorce, and now she's nowhere to be seen.

A documentary about the personal life of a movie critic and his story about his family, especially his father.

Valiasr Street, seventeen kilometers long, connects the south of Tehran to the north and the Alborz mountain range. When this street was built, the parties decorated it with more than 60,000 plane saplings. But today, only about eight thousand plane trees are standing on this street.

The fish is yearning to see the sea once again. He asks a cat, a mouse, a dog and a crow for help, one after another. They each eat a part of his flesh and carry him some distance down the path to the sea. But after a while, one by one, they put him down and leave. At the end, some ants throw the fish's skeleton into the sea. The fish happily swims away in the deep blue sea.

A Documentary about the New Wave movement in Iranian cinema.