The Birth of Light

An Iranian filmmaker, a female taxi driver and a class a about cinema.

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

An 8-year-old boy must return his friend's notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.

A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.

After the earthquake of Guilan, a film director and his son travel to the devastated area to search for the actors from the movie the director made there a few years previously. In their search, they see how people who have lost everything in the earthquake still have hope and try to live life to the fullest.

Several people try to take advantage of a little girl's innocence to hustle money her mom gave to her to buy a goldfish with.

When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.

A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.

Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral 10-year-old boy in a small Iranian town wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors.

A woman orders a suit from a tailor for her young son to wear to her sister's wedding. The tailor's apprentice, together with two other teenage boys who work in the same building, devise a plan to try on the suit at night to see what it feels like.

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.

In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged English writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano.

Pizza man Hussein is a daily witnesses to the unjust distribution of wealth in his native Iran. One day, he finds a purse filled with shockingly expensive receipts from an upscale jewelry store. He attempts to bring the purse back to the store, but because of his working-class attire, he's not allowed inside. Then, during a delivery, a rich man invites Hussein into his extravagant mansion – an event that spurs Hussein to make a desperate bid for wealth.

An old man and a young woman meet in Tokyo. She knows nothing about him, he thinks he knows her. He welcomes her into his home, she offers him her body. But the web that is woven between them in the space of twenty four hours bears no relation to the circumstances of their encounter.

A train travels across Italy toward Rome. Onboard is a professor who daydreams a conversation with a love that never was; a family of Albanian refugees who switch trains and steal a ticket; three brash Scottish soccer fans en route to a match; and a complaining widow travelling to a memorial service for her late husband who's accompanied by a community-service volunteer who's assisting her. Interactions among these Europeans turn on class and nationalism, courtesy and decorum, and opportunities for kindness.

After returning from an errand to get bread, a young boy encounters a dog that frightens him making the journey to get home more difficult than he could’ve imagined.