Celluloid Underground
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series 2025 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema.
Razeh-del (2024)
An award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at Cannes, Locarno, the New York Film Festival and other international festivals, Maryam Tafakory constructs spellbinding assemblages of archive film footage and original imagery to “dissect veiled acts of erasure — of bodies, intimacies, and histories.” Her latest work is an homage to Zan, Iran’s first women’s newspaper published in the 1990s, through reader letters, scenes from classic Iranian films and the reveries of two school girls inspired by its pages to seize the power of their own representations.
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 27 min. Director: Maryam Tafakory.
Celluloid Underground (2023)
Growing up in Iran, London-based director Ehsan Khoshbakht discovered his love for the movies in a country where they were forbidden. Not content to watch films alone, he started a film club that put him in the sights of the authorities but also brought him into contact with a mysterious film collector who, he learns, rescued hundreds of film prints from the hands of the government after the revolution. Part cinema history, part memoir, part mediation on place, identity and the passions that can sustain one through exile, Khoshbakht weaves multiple intersecting lines of inquiry in this always fascinating film essay.
DCP, color, in English and Persian with English subtitles, 80 min. Director: Ehsan Khoshbakht.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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