Tribute to Dariush Mehrjui: Leila
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.
Leila (1997)
Soon after meeting at a joyful gathering of family and friends, Leila (Leila Hatami) and Reza (Ali Mosaffa) are happily married. When Leila learns she can’t have children, however, that supportive network of relations becomes an unrelenting force of social pressure that threatens to drive them apart, most forcefully articulated by Reza’s domineering mother who insists Leila allow Reza to take a second wife. Hatami delivers a devastating performance in Dariush Mehrjui’s unforgettable portrait of a woman under emotional siege that film critic Amy Taubin called “the most brilliant depiction of a marriage gone to hell that I’ve ever seen.”
DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 102 min. Director: Dariush Mehrjui. Screenwriters: Mahnaz Ansarian, Dariush Mehrjui. With: Leila Hatami, Ali Mosaffa, Jamileh Sheikhi.
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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