Filmfarsi
Synopsis
Khoshbakht here uncovers that which was thought destroyed. A cinema of titillation, action and big emotions, which also presented a troubling mirror for the country, as Iran struggled to reconcile its religious traditions with the turbulence of modernity, and the influences of the West.
The often cheap, sleazy and derivative films offer an insight into Iran’s psyche. Among the scratched reels, some keystones of Iran’s extraordinary film culture emerge, too: Gheysar, whose title design was done by a young Abbas Kiarostami; the work of director Samuel Khachikian, a progenitor of Iranian noir; and The Deer, a film which more than any other symbolises the historic violent turns in Iran’s recent past. Filmfarsi presaged a revolution, and it became one of its first victims. — Yusef Sayed
Details
- Year
- 2019
- Type of project
- Features
- Running time
- 83 min
- Director
-
Ehsan Khoshbakht 1st Feature
- Producer
- Ehsan Khoshbakht
- Editor
- Niyaz Saghari
- Screenwriter
- Ehsan Khoshbakht
- Director of Photography
- Ehsan Khoshbakht, Niyaz Saghari
- Sound
- Rob Szeliga
- Composer
- Naiel Ibarrola, Lander Macho
Genre
Categories
Production Status
Production Company
Ehsan Khoshbakht
Sales Company
Ehsan Khoshbakht
Page updates
This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.
See also
You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.
Celluloid Underground
Director: Ehsan Khoshbakht
Year: 2023
After the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, a boy grew up obsessed with all the movies he couldn't see. He met a mysterious film collector who saved thousands of films from destruction by the new regime. Despite arrest and torture, the collector refused to give up his secret hoard. Together they forged a friendship based on passion for cinema and resistance against tyranny. The boy escaped to exile in London to become a filmmaker, and tells their shared story of obsession and celluloid dreams. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Documentary Competition - World premiere
Adlais
Director: Alex Darby, George Leith, Sophie Mei Birkin
Year: 2026
Adlais (Echo) weaves Welsh language folklore and histories through their shared subjects of poetry and drowning – and asks whether we’re listening to the past as it surfaces today.
The End of Times
Director: Luca Anzalone
Year: 2026
Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.