PLAY PODCASTS
New Iranian Cinema

New Iranian Cinema

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore new Iranian cinema and its global impact.

Screenshot · BBC Radio 4

January 30, 202642m 21s

Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (open.live.bbc.co.uk) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.

Show Notes

For more than six decades, in the face of censorship and even imprisonment, Iranian filmmakers have produced some of the world’s best-loved cinema. And now, with the legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s latest film It Was Just An Accident up for Oscar and BAFTA Awards, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode review this extraordinarily rich and unique cinema history.

Mark speaks to the British-Iranian director Babak Anvari about his supernatural-thriller film Under the Shadow, inspired by his experiences growing up during the Iran-Iraq War, and how and why Iranian cinema has had such a huge impact on film culture.

Ellen talks to Sepideh Farsi, who was forced to leave Iran for Paris as a teenager, about her 2009 documentary, Tehran Without Permission, which she made entirely independently on a Nokia cameraphone.

And Ellen also meets Hassan Nazer, an Aberdeen-based Iranian director who came to the UK as a refugee and whose 2022 film Winners is a love-letter to his country’s film-making tradition.

Producer: Artemis Irvine A Prospect Street production for BBC Radio 4