Film festivals are a bran tub: what you find in them may be unexpected, and not always in a good way. Here are six I pulled out in my first week (minus one of my favourites, The Mastermind, which I will review when it goes on general release next week).Jay Kelly If the indie supremo Noah Baumbach hadn’t popped up in person in his new Netflix-produced film, as the director of a sex scene between the younger version of his protagonist and a lead actress who discreetly farts, I don’t think I would have guessed who made Jay Kelly. He seems at times to be channelling Richard Curtis. There are Read more ...

This edition of Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic radio show features guest Pete Lawrence. Pete is one of the good guys – a positive force in the culture, as he says "my life's work is bringing people together".TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW CLICK THIS LINKHis best known interventions include setting up the label Cooking Vinyl, who released an album by Michelle Shocked The Texas Campfire Tapes which became a million selling album – recorded on a cheap machine at a festival round a fire "recording budget…one pound or so". He set up The Big Chill and still does the more intimate Campout Read more ...

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...

The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the authoritarian state, a public space where individuals can have private and often subversive conversations.In his 2015 docufiction Taxi Tehran, the outlawed director Jafar Panahi pretended to be a cab driver, taking inspiration from the late great Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 (2002), in which Mania Akbari, who may have actually been the film’s true begetter, seems to be a taxi driver even if she’s not.Both movies focussed on the atomised lives of Iranians under Read more ...

In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically Read more ...

The Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is many things, some seemingly contradictory: a) a clever, poetic playwright who uses high-tech elements in his work to inventive effect; b) a mischievous presence who likes to appear in his own highly unusual plays; c) a man in pain who is traumatised by his self-imposed exile from Iran. This blend helps make his latest, ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen), a uniquely enriching experience. This production, which is part of LIFT 2024, is like the pieces he has taken to the Edinburgh Fringe: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit in 2014, Nassim in 2017. Read more ...

Here in Europe we mainly see subtle, lyrical Iranian films, targeted at international festivals or art house audiences, so it’s great to get the chance to see Law of Tehran, a gritty and relentless police thriller that was a hit in its home country in 2019.  Saeed Roustayi cast Payman Maadi (pictured below, and best known here from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) as Samad, a ruthless officer determined to take down the drug dealers who enslave Tehran’s army of addicts. We first meet Samad on a police raid that rapidly turns into a dynamic chase through the Read more ...

Timing is everything. The release of Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider at a time when the world’s attention is turned to the treatment of women in Iran should win it more ticket sales than his previous (and far better) film Border managed in 2019.That superb Swedish allegory on racism and misogyny sprang from the imagination of writer John Ajvide Lindqvist. Holy Spider is drawn from Iranian media coverage of the serial killer Saeed Hanaie. In 2000-2001, Hanaei went on a murder spree in the holy city of Masshad, strangling 16 prostitutes. A married man and jobbing Read more ...

The trailer for Panah Panahi’s award-winning first feature Hit the Road is one of the most misleading I’ve yet seen thanks to its jaunty Western pop soundtrack and reassuring caption that the movie resembles an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine.Yes, it’s a pleasurable road movie dealing with a bickering family packed into a car and making a trip that will affect all their lives, and they do burst into communal singing from time to time. But the music they enjoy are songs from pre-Revolution Iran, and for all the comic delights en route, the film has a deeper political resonance than most Read more ...

A Hero, set in the ancient city of Shiraz in southwest Iran, revolves around Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a weak man with gleaming white teeth and a permanent smile. He’s on leave from prison for the weekend, an odd concept in itself, as there are no restrictions to his movements and the whole set-up seems surprisingly lax and polite for what we might expect from an Iranian jail. As soon as he gets out he runs for a bus and misses it, still smiling, which serves as a kind of metaphor for his limp stance in life. His criminality isn't very intriguing, as he's just serving time for owing Read more ...

Love triangles rarely feel more truthful or more tender than in No Hard Feelings, a beautiful film that announces debut director Faraz Shariat as a filmmaker worth reckoning with. The semi-autobiographical story of a young German-Iranian man's budding relationship with a closeted asylum seeker whose countrymen think that being gay is "shit", the movie also comes with one of the loveliest depictions of sibling affection and support to be seen in years: the triangle here embraces sexual desire, to be sure, alongside currents of feeling within families and between friends that help defend Read more ...

Canadian-Iranian director Sadaf Foroughi offers up a gut-wrenching tale of adolescent rebellion set against the strictures of an oppressive Middle Eastern society. It rivals the work of Asghar Farhadi in quality, telling the story of a 17-year-old student whose strong-willed ways lead her into conflict with her watchful parents and teachers.  To Western eyes, Ava’s (Mahour Jabbari) acts of adolescent rebellion seem slight – wanting to study music wouldn’t often be met with disapproval by parents. At school she chats innocently with her best friend Melody (Shayesteh Sajadi), talking Read more ...