Author: Bijan Tehrani

My mother had seen Mashhadi Mohammad — known as Mashhadi Fred Astaire — dance a tap routine on stage that even Fred Astaire himself couldn’t match. God knows when it was — perhaps back when my mother was young, lively, and fond of going to the movies, in the heyday of the musical talkies. Mashhadi was a distant relative of my mother’s who had spent his youth serving American and British soldiers during the Second World War, learning their language and becoming their interpreter. In those same years, Mashhadi became a “dilmāch” — a live translator of films for the…

The film “Woman and Child”, directed by Saeed Roustayi, is both a departure from and a continuation of the cinematic journey of this gifted young filmmaker—a journey that began with Life and a Day, matured through Just 6.5, and reached new depths in Leila’s Brothers. In this new film, Roustayi returns once again to his central concerns: family and social tensions. But this time, he does so with a gentler, more humane, and deeper gaze into the inner workings of suffering and human relationships. Unlike his earlier films where tension often manifested through shouting, physical altercations, and immediate crises, in…

It was last week that Nasser Taghvai turned eighty-four. I celebrated his birthday alone, beneath a sun as scorching as the summer days of Abadan, beside a foreign palm tree—a Californian one—with the hope that all the palm trees in the world belong to one family, whether in Abadan or in the hereafter. These days, if you’re Iranian and, like me, have reached your eighties, you know you’ve lived through several centuries. You started studying under an oil lamp and now find yourself in the digital world. You’ve witnessed a revolution with your own eyes and, like me, perhaps have…

Last Night I Was Suddenly Thrown into the Presence of Monsieur Georges Méliès! The French genius who, due to his astonishing abilities in filmmaking and manipulating reality on screen, earned the title “the first magician of cinema.” I suspect I had been thinking about Asghar Farhadi’s new film project in Paris before falling asleep. Whatever it was, the journalist in me wouldn’t let go—I seized the opportunity and conducted an exclusive interview with this cinematic sorcerer and France’s first film director! Bijan Tehrani: Monsieur Méliès! I’m thrilled that, over a century after A Trip to the Moon, you finally found…

Ingmar Bergman is the child of a silence that emerged whispering from the heart of darkness; the child of a light shining through an invisible window into the abandoned cellar of the human mind, illuminating a memory hidden in the shadows. His birthday is not the anniversary of a man’s birth, but the birth of a question: the birth of doubt—a doubt suspended forever between faith and the death of faith, between the body and the soul, between truth and dream. For me, born in the East amid philosophy, mysticism, and the poetry of Rumi and Sohrab Sepehri, Bergman’s world…

These two images on the wall of my home enchant me—they are precious mementos, gifts from my dear artist friend Abbas Bagherian, whose works have eternally captured a wondrous world of dreamlike glimpses of life. These beautiful and evocative pictures invite me, with every glance, into a new moment of revelation. Abbas Bagherian, the imaginative and talented Iranian photographer, is among those rare artists who treat the camera not merely as a tool for recording reality, but as a brush for painting the world of their vision. The result feels like a dreamy painting on canvas, infused with the hues…

Hayedeh Safiyari and Soren B. Ebbe won Best Editing in a Documentary Feature at 2025 Tribeca Intwernational Film Festival for An Eye for an Eye (Denmark, Iran, United States) – World Premiere. “For its narrative precision, for locking us inside a moral crucible without relief, and for weaving a multigenerational, deeply personal story that gives equal weight to all participants with searing emotional impact, and for the clarity and courage of its storytelling. Not one frame feels gratuitous as the film barrels relentlessly towards its conclusion.” An Eye for an Eye directed by Tanaz Eshaghian, Farzad Jafarialso received Tribeca’s Special Jury Mention…

Ten years have passed since he left, and yet we still haven’t grown used to his absence. A man who wielded his camera like his eyes and cast a gaze kinder than poetry upon the world—Abbas Kiarostami has not been among us for a decade now. He left with the same quiet grace with which he lived. But how tragic that he left unjustly, in vain, and in silence—in a foreign land, while galaxies of images, seen as only he could see them, still swirled in his mind; with poems yet to be written, and films left unmade. For ten…

Cinema, as one of the most powerful tools of storytelling, has often been used to chronicle the pain, resilience, and identity of a people. For Palestinians, whose history is deeply marked by displacement, occupation, and enduring resistance, film has become not just an artistic medium but a vital means of documentation, testimony, and preservation of memory. The story of Palestine is one that has frequently been silenced, misrepresented, or ignored by dominant global narratives. It is within the frame of cinema—through the lens of Palestinian filmmakers and international allies—that a different voice emerges: one that speaks of shattered homes, vanished…

Rome Is Not Just a City, It’s a Poem Flowing Through Time and Space Rome, the capital of memories, holds the stories of hundreds of wars, thousands of love affairs, and tens of thousands of coins tossed into the Trevi Fountain in hope. It is not merely a place to live, but a place to dream, to recall forgotten beauties, and to fall in love… Cinema—being a mirror of dreams and memory—has turned to Rome time and again to immortalize itself through its image. In dark theatres, Rome glows on screen, reminding us that this city never truly dies; it…