The Garden of Stones

A short documentary about the 4th Shiraz Arts Festival and its series of performances that took place in September 1970.

A strange and mischievous documentary on an archeological site in the Qaytarieh hills in Tehran. This short narrates the story of the dead people who wished never to be found.

The film which was shelved for many years focuses on men and women visiting the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite Imam, in the city of Mashhad in the North East of Iran.

Sohrab, a provincial young writer, is lost in the desert on the way to Tehran to get a publication license for his book on old Persian poetry, but the trip involves some bizarre events.

A director of a television series on the history of cinema, who has been grappling with the screenplay of his first feature film, receives an assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in a remote region of Zahedan province. He has already hired Turkmen tribespeople for his film and selected his filming location. Meanwhile his wife, who is working on her Ph.D. dissertation about the Mongol invasion of Iran, attempts to dissuade him from accepting the assignment. One night, while working on his history of the cinema series, the director fantasizes a diegetic world that consists of clever juxtapositions of his different worlds: the history of cinema, the history of the mongol invasion, his own film idea and his imminent assignment to the desert.

An old hermit lives in a slum and wants to teach the alphabet to the children who regularly go there to play. When a child proposes he use the word “Pelican” for the letter ‘P’, the hermit goes to the nearby park to see this animal he has never heard of.

30 years after their first encounter, Kimiavi goes to find Dervish Khan Esfandiarpur again to witness the persistency of his ‘surreal’ behaviour through time. The dervish dancer may have become an old man but his garden and rituals all remain…

In this film that sends up the foibles of filmmaking, a standard crew of actors, stage-hands, director, writers, producers, and others are gathered for the filming of a 45-second automobile commercial. Each role embodies an archetype (the harried director who has a deadline to meet, the Scrooge production manager who has a budget to meet, and the writers who are above these mundane concerns), and these personalities drive the working actors over the edge until they decide to lock them up and do their own thing -- happiness can be just around the corner if you are in the driver's seat. Hopefully, the actors will be able to bow out before the police catch on to the situation.

Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930.

In a remote village in the "land of roses and nightingales" one day surfaces a stranger: William Knox D'Arcy. To enact his plan for exploiting the wealth and the natural resources of this land, he sends after his cronies who descend upon the village in a big balloon. Among them is Cindrella a lady of electrifying beauty who is enlisted to keep the illiterate and lecherous villagers under her charm and make them follow D'Arcy's plans...

An Iranian Movie.