Tribute to Dariush Mehrjui: Hamoon / The Pear Tree
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.
In-person: Maryam Mehrjui and Safa Mehrjui, daughter and son of Dariush Mehrjui.
Writer-director Dariush Mehrjui studied cinema and philosophy at UCLA before returning to Iran in the late 1960s where his second feature The Cow is credited with launching the Iranian New Wave. A giant of Iran cinema for over five decades until his untimely, tragic death in 2023, Mehrjui was a fierce critic of the Iranian regime and fought government censorship throughout his career. In his films, he explored the psychological toll of fear, ignorance and oppression on the lives of individuals with grace, insight and poetry.
Hamoon (1990)
“Why did it go wrong? How did it start?” So ruminates a bitter Hamoon (Khosro Shakibai) after his wife (Bita Farahi) demands a divorce, but the questions about his marriage take on ever stronger existential consequences. A middle manager at a trading company, the middle-aged Hamoon aspires to the intellectual life (his wife is a celebrated abstract painter) but his struggle to complete a philosophy thesis only compounds his sense of anger and resentment. Director and co-writer Dariush Mehrjui shakes up his acute study of a marriage and a life on the rocks with unreliable flashbacks and surreal dream sequences that draw us inexorably deeper in Hamoon’s collapsing psychology.
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 120 min. Director: Dariush Mehrjui. Screenwriters: Dariush Mehrjui, Haroon Yashayayi. With: Khosro Shakibai, Bita Farahi, Ezzatolah Entezami.
The Pear Tree (1998)
An intellectual author struggling with writer’s block, Mahmoud (Homayoun Ershadi) retreats to the country villa where he grew up only to be confronted by a prized pear tree that refuses to bear fruit and aching memories of his first love, played by a radiant Golshifteh Farahani making her feature film debut. In Dariush Mehrjui’s masterpiece of middle-aged doubt, the personal and the political steep in longing and regret while almost every shot comes suffused in golden, autumnal light captured through the lens of cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari. DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 95 min. Director: Dariush Mehrjui. Screenwriters: Dariush Mehrjui, Goli Taraghi. With: Homayoun Ershadi, Golshifteh Farahani.
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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