Roshan

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

Iran, 2021

A middle-aged sad sack, Roshan (Reza Attaran) watches old movies and daydreams while his life falls apart around him. His wife has moved out with their young daughter, he’s facing eviction from their old apartment and the condo they bought years before to get a fresh start remains forever under construction, sapping cash and hope. Luckily, Roshan knows a trick: he uses his fingers to form a frame—like a movie director—to see only what he wants to see. Writer-director Rouhollah Hejazi (The Wedlock, screened in the 2014 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema) deftly oscillates his own frame around Roshan as he stumbles through a series of, by turns, comic and troubling misadventures in this empathetic study of a man doing his best to keep reality at bay.

(2021, dir. Rouhollah Hejazi, DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 102 min.) 

International premiere

Iran, 2018

In director Maryam Mohajer’s poignant and beautiful animated collage of materials and memories, a young girl narrates the milestones of her life—getting her ears pierced, learning where babies come from, the fabulous red dress of her favorite pop star—against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq War.

(2018, dir. Maryam Mohajer, DCP, color, 9 min.)