Bijan Daneshmand
Babak, an Iranian student in Greece, doesn't show up to welcome his visiting parents at the Athens airport. Pari and her older husband, both devout Muslims abroad for the first time, are ill-prepared to search for their son in an intimidating and alien environment. All their attempts to find a clue that might lead them to him prove to be in vain and they soon reach a dead end. But Pari can't give up looking for him, even when returning to Iran seems like her only choice. Following the steps of her rebellious son in the darkest corners of the city, she will exhaust her inner strength to achieve more than a mother's search for her missing son.
After Shideh's building is hit by a missile during the Iran-Iraq War, a superstitious neighbor suggests that the missile was cursed and might be carrying malevolent Middle-Eastern spirits. She becomes convinced a supernatural force within the building is attempting to possess her daughter Dorsa, and she has no choice but to confront these forces if she is to save her daughter and herself.
Mania Akbari’s From Tehran to London (2012), has a Russian-doll structure. It begins with Akbari shooting her latest film entitled Women Do Not Have Breasts about a couple, the young poet and writer Ava and her upper-class older husband Ashkan, who live in a large, beautiful – yet isolated – house in the hilly outskirts of the city. Household workers Maryam and Rahim attend to their needs. But despite their comfortable lives, Ava is increasingly dissatisfied and estranged in her relationship with Ashkan. What seems to have been an exciting relationship in the past is now little more than a series of mutual reproaches, as Ashkan incessantly tries to change Ava into someone she isn’t – a dutiful wife.
Dancing Mania is a short documentary on the latest film by Mania Akbari titled, From Tehran to London. The film takes a closer look at Akbari’s latest boundary-pushing film that displays females dancing for the first time in Iranian cinema after the revolution. Dancing Mania not only reviews the evolutionary growth of Akbari as an expressive filmmaker in the constrained atmosphere of Iran, but it intelligently employs stills, stop motion imagery, and backstage footage to capture the depth of the themes that are played out in From Tehran to London. Through the lens of critical analysis with a touch of Freudian psychoanalysis, the documentary comments on how the themes of dance, death, sexuality, censorship and devastation come to light through the actor’s dialogues and symbols in the film.
In a drab, anonymous gray school governed by a strict authoritarian regime, an apparently unremarkable day is turned on its head following a seemingly ridiculous announcement. Disbelieving at first, the all male, identically uniformed pupils are informed that what they had always been taught as fact is no longer true. When the incredulous students speak out, what initially seems laughably absurd becomes desperately real as they are forced to question how far they will go to stand up for their beliefs. Two & Two is an allegory for the absurdness of dictatorship and tyranny - and the resilience of the human spirit.
Johnny is a long-serving MI5 officer. His boss dies suddenly, leaving behind an inexplicable file which threatens the stability of the organisation.
During the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller and his team of Army inspectors are dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one booby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but stumble instead upon an elaborate cover-up that threatens to invert the purpose of their mission.
Against the tumultuous backdrop of Iran's 1953 CIA-backed coup d'état, the destinies of four women converge in a beautiful orchard garden, where they find independence, solace and companionship.
When young dad, Joe, discovers he's dying, drifter Charlie is given a unique opportunity to turn his life around. A story of family, identity and starting again.
The subject of the film is male-female relationships. Composed of 7 vignettes, "20 Fingers" features Mania Akbari and Bijan Daneshmand as a contemporary Iranian couple. The film is an intense, bumpy series of conversations and sometimes quarrels reflecting the problems facing Iranian men and women and the struggle between modernism and tradition, liberalism and conservatism.
When a large Iranian-American family gathers in NYC for the patriarch’s heart transplant, a family secret is uncovered and catapults the estranged mother and daughter into an exploration of the past
