Author: Bijan Tehrani

All That’s Left of You, by Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian American actress, director, producer, and screenwriter, is Jordan’s Oscar submission.  All That’s Left of You arrives not only as a cinematic achievement but as a profound act of remembrance, resistance, and human testimony. To watch it is to step into the texture of memory itself, a film that lingers not just in the mind but in the very bloodstream. It is rare to encounter a work that carries such epic historical weight while also remaining tethered to the smallest, most intimate details of life. Yet this is precisely what this…

For me, Claudia Cardinale was always more than a star. She was the girl with a small suitcase, an eternal traveler who never truly returned from her journeys. Every time she appeared on the screen, I felt a new story begin—one that only she could tell with her gaze. Today, the news of her passing struck me like a cold wind on a lover’s heart; it felt as if The Girl with a Suitcase, who had inspired my dreams and my words for so many years, had quietly picked up her suitcase and left without saying goodbye. In Fellini’s 8½,…

I have always loved Hitchcock and regard him not merely as an auteur, but as a creator who gave birth to an entirely new world—a galaxy where countless filmmakers have lived and built their own planets. Among the great Hitchcock scholars worldwide, a few of the Iranian critics such as Parviz Davaei, Kiumars Vejdani, and Bahram Beyzaie hold a very special place in my view. For all Hitchcock enthusiasts, I highly recommend the book Hitchcock in the Frame, the result of a long conversation with Bahram Beyzaie about Hitchcock’s cinematic language. (the book is in Farsi and we will translate…

Rodrigo García’s Mother and Child is one of those rare ensemble dramas that approaches its subject with extraordinary delicacy yet leaves a lasting emotional weight. The film, which García both wrote and directed in 2009, interlaces three stories shaped by adoption, bringing them together into a single portrait of longing, loss, and renewal. It is a quiet work, free of melodrama, that builds its power through honesty and restraint. At the heart of the film is Karen, played with remarkable precision by Annette Bening. As a teenager she gave up her baby for adoption, and decades later she lives a…

Hiroshi Okuyama’s My Sunshine is a film that works like a whispered poem, quiet in tone yet immense in emotional impact. It is the kind of work that never tries to overwhelm the viewer with spectacle, but rather builds its power through patience, intimacy, and an almost invisible craftsmanship. What immediately stands out is the way Okuyama approaches the essence of childhood and memory, not through nostalgia in the conventional sense, but through a gaze that feels both tender and unflinching. He captures the fragility of moments that slip through our fingers, the fleeting warmth of human connections, and the…

Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives is not a film that demands attention through spectacle or through the machinery of plot; instead, it whispers, it lingers, and it reminds us that life is built not out of dramatic climaxes but from fragments of intimacy, moments of hesitation, encounters that might last only a few minutes yet leave behind reverberations that shape our inner landscapes for years. The film takes the daring form of nine separate episodes, each filmed in a single unbroken take, each focused on a different character caught at a threshold between past and future, desire and renunciation, love and…

Rodrigo García’s Ten Tiny Love Stories is one of those rare cinematic experiments that proves how much can be conveyed with the simplest of means when guided by a filmmaker with sensitivity and courage. Built entirely around a series of monologues, each performed by a different woman, the film strips away the trappings of conventional narrative—no elaborate sets, no flashy editing, no multi-strand plot mechanics—to focus instead on the naked intimacy of confession. What García accomplishes is a chamber piece that feels both startlingly raw and profoundly human, offering us not just “stories” but lived fragments of longing, heartbreak, desire,…

Ido Fluk’s Köln 75 is a vibrant and heartfelt retelling of one of the most remarkable nights in modern music history, a film that succeeds as both an intimate character study and a celebration of artistic perseverance. At its center is Vera Brandes, the teenage promoter whose faith and determination led to Keith Jarrett’s legendary Köln Concert. As embodied by Mala Emde, Vera is a force of nature, bubbling with youthful enthusiasm and comic energy, a performance that critics have rightly singled out as dynamic and joyful. Emde captures both the recklessness and conviction of an eighteen-year-old who dares to…

Cinema Without Borders has announced its jury members to decide on the winner of 2025  Bridging The Borders Award at the LUCAS International Festival for Young Film Lover in Germany. LUCAS programmers have also announced the nominees for the Cinema Without Borders’ Bridging The Borders Award sponsored by 360 Media. A jury of six, formed by CWB will decide on the winning films at the closing night of the festival. Keely Badger, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of 360 MEDIAn Consulting , the sponsor of the Bridging The Borders Award, will announce the winning film in a video message that will be…

Bashu, The Little Stranger remains one of the most luminous works in the history of Iranian cinema and its recognition at the Venice Film Festival is both a triumph of artistic integrity and an affirmation of the universal power of storytelling that transcends borders, languages, and cultural boundaries. Bahram Beyzai’s masterpiece is at once a tale of exile, survival, motherhood, cultural collision, and above all, human resilience, told with a poet’s sensibility and a dramatist’s sharp instinct for human conflict. That this film, made decades earlier, has returned to the center of global cinematic attention and secured the Golden Lion…