
Tehran Taboo
★ 7.1 · 2017 · 96m · Drama · Animation
The lives of three strong-willed women and a young musician cross paths in Tehran’s schizophrenic society where sex, adultery, corruption, prostitution and drugs coexist with strict religious law. In this bustling modern metropolis, avoiding prohibition has become an everyday sport and breaking taboos can be a means of personal emancipation.
More Like This

Close-Up
1990 · ★ 8
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.
More info →
Taste of Cherry
1997 · ★ 7.7
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.
More info →
Vixen!
1968 · ★ 5.5
In a Canadian mountain resort, Vixen Palmer resides with her naive pilot husband Tom. While he's away flying in tourists, she sleeps with practically everybody including a husband and his wife, and even her biker brother. However, the only one she won't bed is her brother's friend... who is Black.
More info →
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
1976 · ★ 6.3
Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.
More info →
Offside
2006 · ★ 7
During the 2006 World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain, numerous young women are caught and rounded up for dressing as men so they could gain access to the game. Guarded by several soldiers in a holding pen, the women attempt to keep updated on the score.
More info →
The Color of Paradise
1999 · ★ 7.6
Mohammad joyfully returns to his tiny village on summer vacation from the Institute for the Blind, unaware of his widowed father's intentions to disown him in order to win the hand—and dowry—of a local woman. With the wedding swiftly approaching, Mohammad's future hangs precariously in the balance as his father struggles against his destiny, unable to see the wonder of life and love that's so clear to his son.
More info →
Desert Dancer
2014 · ★ 6.9
Inspirational true story of Iranian dancer Afshin Ghaffarian, who risked his life for his dream to become a dancer despite a nationwide dancing ban.
More info →
Teheran '43
1981 · ★ 6.4
This story starts in 1980 in Paris as the memories of Andrei Borodin, a Soviet agent, take the action back to 1943 during the Teheran meetings of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. A high-ranking Nazi officer developed a plan to assassinate the three world leaders in order to undermine the Allied forces. He commissioned the German agent Max Richard to carry out his plan, but it failed miserably due to the quick action and thinking of Andrei. While in Teheran, Andrei met a French woman, Marie Louni, living in the city and they had a brief but intense affair. Nearly four decades later, the Nazi officer has been captured - but not for long. Freed by terrorists, the officer is hunting down the German agent who failed to carry out the planned assassinations. Max lives at Françoise, a young French woman, who hides him.
More info →
Ten
2002 · ★ 7.3
A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.
More info →
Memories of a Burning Body
2024 · ★ 6.6
Raised in a repressive era where sexuality was taboo, Ana, Patricia, and Mayela found their understanding of womanhood based on unspoken rules and implicit impositions. Now, their fearless voices incarnate in a single 65-year-old woman, who revisits a kaleidoscopic life of intertwined memories, secrets, and hidden desires.
More info →
Kinsey
2004 · ★ 6.6
Kinsey is a portrait of researcher Alfred Kinsey, driven to uncover the most private secrets of a nation. What begins for Kinsey as a scientific endeavor soon takes on an intensely personal relevance, ultimately becoming an unexpected journey into the mystery of human behavior.
More info →
Pig
2018 · ★ 5.7
A serial killer is going around killing Iran's most beloved filmmakers. Hasan, a blacklisted filmmaker himself, is depressed and wonders: why isn't he being targeted?
More info →