2024 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema

The UCLA Film & Television Archive is proud to continue its long tradition of bringing the best cinema from Iran and the Iranian diaspora to Los Angeles. Ever mindful of the ongoing struggles facing Iranian filmmakers in their native country, this year’s program champions the work of new and emerging directors while bringing back to the screen a long-thought-lost landmark of Iranian cinema. Making its world restoration premiere, writer-director Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977) was the first feature film directed by an Iranian woman and returns to the big screen almost 50 years after Nabili smuggled a workprint of the film out of Iran in a suitcase on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. We are also once again happy to present selected finalists from the 2023 edition of the Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival. The power of the moving image to connect people otherwise distanced by cultural, political and national divides and to lift them up in times of crisis has been embodied nowhere more profoundly over the last several decades than in the humanism, artistry and courage of Iranian filmmakers. The Archive is honored to highlight their work, again, at the Billy Wilder Theater.

Program generously funded by the Farhang Foundation.