Programs & Events

Based on Azar Nafisi’s best-selling memoir, this sweeping story of perseverance and resistance follows a literature professor from her return to Tehran in 1979 during the brief window of optimism after the Iranian Revolution through to her eventual exile in 1997.

Payman Maadi delivers a surprising and deeply affecting performance as Iman, an Iranian exile newly arrived in Sweden with his wife and two young children while they anxiously await word on their application for political asylum.

Directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi and written by Mohammad Rasoulof, Seven Days is a raw, intense exploration of the cost of resistance and freedom.

Now in its 16th year at the Hammer, Bloomsday is a worldwide annual celebration of James Joyce and his landmark book Ulysses. This lively celebration features a cast of actors delivering dramatic readings from the novel interspersed with songs.

A riveting portrait of a woman driven to seek her own justice in defiance of the malign forces working to conceal the truth, The Witness challenges Iran’s censorship regime with images of liberated women unseen in Iranian cinema for generations.

Writer-director Oktay Baraheni’s second feature taps into global anxieties as a monumental domestic drama that doubles as an acute study of tyranny and violence.

Part cinema history, part memoir, part mediation on place, identity and the passions that can sustain one through exile, director Ehsan Khoshbakht weaves multiple intersecting lines of inquiry in this always fascinating film essay.

Co-presented with TransUP (Transgender UCLA Pride) Democracy, truth, and justice hang in the balance in this riveting documentary that follows the battle against anti-trans legislation to the highest court in the land.

Free weekly drop-in sessions are open to all who are interested in learning how to live more presently.