Absence

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

At a crossroads in his life, a middle-aged son journeys from Tehran to Prague to trace his father’s path through the tumultuous history of his own times only to find himself even more unmoored in the present. In his third feature as writer-director and star, Ali Mosaffa brings a wounded intensity to Rouzbeh on his quest to better understand his father, a communist intellectual who started a new life in Eastern Europe in the wake of the 1953 coup. Every clue he tracks down, however, deepens the mystery surrounding the man he thought he knew. Behind the camera, Mosaffa mixes family drama and political history with the air of a cold war thriller.

DCP, color, 100 min. Director: Ali Mosaffa. Screenwriter: Ali Mosaffa. With: Ali Mosaffa, Zuzana Stivínová, Magdalena Borová, Petra Nesvačilová, Zuzana Kronerová.