Author: Bijan Tehrani

This year, the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, held from August 27 to September 6, 2025, was once again dedicated to presenting the latest works of world cinema along with a selection of classics and timeless films. The festival this year hosted a mix of great filmmakers and new talents. The most important prize of the festival, the Golden Lion for Best Film, went to Jim Jarmusch’s new work, Father Mother Sister Brother, a film that, in the filmmaker’s usual tradition, arises from a poetic and calm look at life and human relationships and earned the admiration of the jury.…

A tribute to Rodrigo Garcia – Part 1 Rodrigo García’s Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her is one of those rare works of cinema that does not need to raise its voice to be heard, a film that quietly asserts itself as a masterpiece of subtle observation, an act of listening as much as storytelling. Released in 2000 as García’s feature debut, it feels less like the arrival of a new director than the continuation of a cinematic tradition that values silence, tenderness, and human fragility over spectacle. From its first images, it announces its commitment to…

The film The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania is one of the most powerful cinematic works to emerge in recent years, a film that instantly captured international attention when it premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. It received an unprecedented standing ovation of nearly twenty-four minutes, the longest in the history of major film festivals, and immediately became a focal point for debates about cinema, politics, and ethics. The subject of the film is as simple as it is devastating: it recounts the final moments in the life of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who,…

The new Hulu series on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox positions itself as an exposé of Italy’s broken justice system, but in doing so, it slips into a kind of national self-deception. The filmmakers spare no detail in condemning the investigative blunders in Perugia: contaminated evidence, overzealous prosecutors, a press corps hungry for scandal. Yet the story is framed as though such injustice is uniquely Italian, a foreign pathology. This selective outrage is its greatest weakness. Because if we glance homeward, the picture is far uglier. The United States currently cages innocent immigrants in what detainees themselves call “Alligator…

Roy Andersson’s life and filmmaking style form one of the most unusual and idiosyncratic chapters in world cinema, a path that stands apart from the mainstream and resists comparison with any of his contemporaries. Born in 1943 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Andersson grew up in a postwar society where existential questions about meaning, survival, guilt, and human dignity were floating in the air. From his early days he showed a fascination for art, painting, and the visual arrangement of space. His films bear the unmistakable mark of a painter’s eye, a deeply considered approach to framing, light, and composition that has…

In the growing silence of drying rivers, cracked soils, and parched throats, the cinema of our times has begun to echo the desperate pulse of a world thirsty for water—both literally and symbolically. As global warming intensifies and water scarcity transforms from regional hardship to planetary emergency, filmmakers across the globe have responded with films that are urgent, poetic, chilling, or heartbreaking in their portrayals of a world where the most basic element of life has become contested, commodified, or simply vanished. The cinematic gaze toward water scarcity is not just an environmental commentary; it is a deeply human concern,…

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…