Inside Amir / Divine Comedy
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series 2026 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
Inside Amir (2025)
After his girlfriend emigrates to Italy with the expectation that he will soon follow, bike messenger Amir (Amirhossein Hosseini) is still neither fully committed to leaving nor fully clear on what the future holds if he stays in Iran. Instead, he spends his in-between days hanging with friends who have themselves settled into a life of drift, playing poker, cooking meals together and biking around the city and country. Nothing ever really happens, which is precisely the point of writer-director Amir Azizi’s warm and loving portrait of a generation that has learned to embrace simple freedoms and pleasures where they can find them in a world where even that can feel like an act of resistance.
DCP. Director/Screenwriter: Amir Azizi. With: Amirhossein Hosseini, Hadis Nazari, Nader Pourmahin.
Divine Comedy (2025)
Iranian writer-director Bahram Ark (Skin, Animal) plays Bahram, an Iranian writer-director who has achieved fame on the international festival circuit but has yet to have one of his films screened in Iran. After his latest is again denied a permit, he and his producer Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari) set out on her moped determined to find a way to get it on screen with the help of a hodgepodge of decidedly eccentric characters. Bahram’s situation is all too familiar to co-writer-director Ali Asgari (Terrestrial Verses) and his regular collaborators here, who use romantic comedy tropes to illuminate the absurdities—and dangers—faced by filmmakers in Iran.
DCP. Director: Ali Asgari. Screenwriter: Alireza Khatami, Bahram Ark, Bahman Ark, Ali Asgari. With: Bahram Ark, Sadaf Asgari, Hossein Soleimani.
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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