Series Site
March 7–April 23, 2026
BAMPFA partners with Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, on a series that dovetails with her spring semester course. We present recent digital restorations of three classic Iranian films—The Postman (Dariush Mehrjui, 1972); Far from Home (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1975), which is cross-listed with this season’s Fassbinder and the New German Cinema; and Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahram Beyzaie, 1986)—the filmmakers of which were all associated with the Iranian New Wave movement.
For this collaboration, UC Berkeley hosts the celebrated Iranian film director and screenwriter Rakhshan Banietemad (born 1954, Tehran). She will present two documentaries that focus on the environment and the power of women to change society: her own All My Trees, and Mother of the Earth, directed by Mahnaz Afzali, for which Banietemad served as artistic consultant. She will also present two of her feature films: Under the Skin of the City, which turns the lives of a family into an analogy of the struggles and strangled hopes of an entire nation; and Gilaneh (codirected by Mohsen Abdolvahab), a family drama set against the backdrop of the war between Iran and Iraq and the US bombing of Baghdad fifteen years later, which stands as a poignant expression of the human cost of war.
—Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator