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Tribeca Film Festival Films from the Region

Abadan

Separated from but still emotionally attached to her husband, a woman searches desperately for her runaway father who is obsessed with going to Abadan, the oil-rich city destroyed in the war with Iraq. Aided by a remarkable cast, Haghighi's directorial debut portrays a middle class rarely depicted in Iranian films today.
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Afghanistan, The Lost Truth

An honest look at a war-ravaged land after the fall of the Taliban, going beyond the now-clichéd images of so many recent films. Actress/director Maleknasr travels the country interviewing a wide range of Afghans who, despite the turmoil and suffering they have endured, poignantly voice their collective dreams for their nation's future.
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Baghdad High

Four classmates (Kurd, Christian, Shiite, and Sunni/Shiite) in Baghdad are given cameras to document their last year in high school, resulting in a rare firsthand view of what it’s like growing up where sectarian violence rages right outside the classroom window.
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Blood of My Brother

Thoughts of revenge are tempered by more practical concerns in The Blood of My Brother, which shows the war in Iraq from the perspective of an Iraqi family grieving the loss of a son who was killed by an American patrol as he stood guard at a mosque. A Life-Size Entertainment and Releasing release.
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Crystal

A young woman is afflicted by a strange and rare disease that leads to painful crystals being produced in her eyelids and uterus. In her directorial debut, Akbari (lead actress in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten) transcends the sensational aspects of this bizarre case and movingly portrays a character discovering her femininity.
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Day Break

In Iran, a murder conviction allows for the victim's family to choose capital punishment or forgiveness for the perpetrator. This harrowing, existential film shows a convicted murderer trapped in painful purgatory as his family distances themselves from him and his victim's family repeatedly delays their ultimate decision.
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Fireworks Wednesday

On the last Wednesday before the spring solstice ushers in the Persian New Year, people set off fireworks following an ancient Zoroastrian tradition. Rouhi, spending her first day at a new job, finds herself in the midst of a different kind of fireworks--an acrimonious domestic dispute between her new boss and his wife.
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Gilaneh

It is the Iranian New Year, 1988. Sadaam is bombing Tehran. And Gilaneh's family is being ripped apart by the war. Her son-in-law is missing after deserting the army. Her charming son, Ishmael, is heading off to fight for his country. Fifteen years later, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gilaneh is alone in her village home, taking care of Ishmael, now an invalid veteran. This beautifully shot, timely film overflows with unwavering pain, suffering and hope.
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Half Moon

Graying but determined, Mamo is a famed Kurdish musician who obtains permission to cross the Iranian border to give his first concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. But the journey poses endless challenges, especially when he tries to bring a female singer from Iran, where performances by women have been silenced since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Winner of the Golden Shell, 2006 San Sebastian Film Festival. In Kurdish and Farsi. A Strand Release.
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Head Wind

The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran does its best to restrict its citizens' access to information and media from the rest of the world. The award-winning director of Iron Island shows how Iranians demonstrate what we'd call "Yankee resourcefulness" to stymie their censors.
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Inside Out

There are probably few places in the world where it's more difficult to be a transexual than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Inside Out follows three Iranians-a middle-aged woman, a high school drop out, and an unemployed newly wed-as they undergo their internal and external metamorphoses.
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Lost Girl

Director Ali Taleb depicts what has happened to the people of Iraq by telling the story of Huda, one of many Iraqi women forced to work in Jordan as a prostitute just to survive. Huda candidly describes her situation and philosophy.
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Men at Work

This subtle and comic political allegory focuses on four middle-class guys who pile into their car for a ski weekend (already a jolt to Western expectations about Iranian movies). A brief stop at a picturesque vista leads to their chance discovery of a prominent rock formation it seems would be oh so easy to tip over, but…
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Navel

This experimental "reality drama" depicts a few seemingly idle days in the lives of four men and a woman who share an apartment. Frank sexual dialogue, non-linear structure, and the use of symbolic images distinguish Navel from much recent Iranian cinema, while Shirvani's jittery DV camera provides a rare intimate glimpse inside contemporary Tehran society from the point of view of an Iranian-American woman.
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Night of the Hunchback

This dark comedy, a key masterwork of Iranian cinema, has long remained unseen in the West. Adapted from a story in 1001 Nights and set in a popular theatre troupe, the story follows the death of an actor in a farcical accident and the brilliantly elaborated gags and misunderstandings that abound in subsequent attempts to dispose of his body.
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Once Upon a Time in Marrakech

In the autumn of 2005, 16 film students from NYC and Morocco converged on Marrakech as guests of the Tribeca Film Institute, Tribeca Film Festival, and the Marrakech International Film Festival Foundation to study under Abbas Kiarostami (joined at one point by Martin Scorsese). This document, by the master's longtime director of photography, will screen with a new Kiarostami short, Roads of Kiarostami, and some of the students' works. (total running time 110 min.)
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President Mir Qanbar

A 75-year old villager mounts his third campaign for Iran’s presidency, aided only by a disabled sidekick, to whom he’s naturally promised the post of Minister of Health. Shot during the same election that brought just as unlikely (but far less endearing) candidate to power, this is a droll portrait of a man stubbornly holding onto his dream.
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Roads of Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami has recently been exhibiting his black-and-white landscape photographs at venues around the world, and Roads of Kiarostami is both a companion piece to these exhibits and an extension of them. Static shots of the photos alternate with footage of Kiarostami's car winding through mountain roads, as the Iranian filmmaker muses in voice-over on the significance of the journey and the path in his own work and in Persian literature.
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Saddam's Mass Graves

Iraqi Kurd Rosebiani returned to Iraq with the specific goal of documenting the legacy of Saddam Hussein's regime. Interviews with survivors and with relatives of victims drive home the point that, as one official notes, while bloody dictators usually attempt to hide their crimes, Saddam enjoyed showing off his brutality. Screens with The War Is Over!
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Siah Bâzi: The Joy Makers

The alarming disappearance of humor from Iran's political discourse is traced when an improv troupe of political satirists, the leader of which is a Persian counterpart of the medieval jester, learn that the government is about to close their theater. Preceded by Inside Out, a short about Iranian transsexuals.
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Sounds of Silence

In Iran, where half the population is under 30, Western music is banned, and the solo female voice has not been heard singing in public since the Revolution. But as this film reveals, young men and women in burgeoning underground bands are defying the system by using the Internet to get their music heard. In Farsi.
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War Is Over!

The prizewinning director of A Time for Drunken Horses and Marooned in Iraq went to Iraq immediately after Saddam's fall in an attempt to bring cinema back to a country where it had ceased to exist. This impromptu sketchbook of what he saw reveals the postwar confusion, and Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurd, captures an unforgettable slice of reality. Screens with Saddam's Mass Graves.
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War, Love, God & Madness

It's no surprise that making a feature film in Iraq in 2003 wasn't a picnic. But this extraordinary account of the peril-filled ordeal that the director and crew of Ahlaam went through must be seen to be believed.
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Zaman, the Man From the Reeds

A peasant from the marshlands of southern Iraq journeys in a tiny boat up the Tigris to Baghdad, seeking medicine for his sick wife. The first feature shot in Iraq in more than a decade effectively mixes lyricism with documentary-style realism, capturing the final days of life under Saddam Hussein, whose regime confiscated five reels of this film that are now lost forever.
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