Annual Festival of Films from Iran
June 5–11, 2026
This yearly showcase spotlights the innovation, resilience, and humanism of contemporary Iranian filmmakers and acclaimed Iranian auteurs. For the 37th year of the Festival of Films from Iran, we’re honoring influential Iranian filmmaker Bahram Beyzaie with a limited retrospective and presenting a slate of compelling contemporary films by Iranian and Iranian-diaspora filmmakers.
The Gene Siskel Film Center’s Festival of Films from Iran is one of the oldest festivals in the United States dedicated to showcasing Iranian cinema. The festival was co-founded in 1989, by then-director of programming Barbara Scharres and filmmaker and film scholar Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa with support from then-associate director of programming Martin Rubin. Each year, the festival celebrates the best of Iranian cinema by presenting a curated selection of highly artistic films, introducing audiences to – and deepening their appreciation of – the rich culture of Iran and its cinematic traditions.
About Bahram Beyzaie
This year, the Fest honors Bahram Beyzaie—filmmaker, playwright, scholar, and visionary—whose work stands as one of the most profound expressions of contemporary Iranian culture. A central figure of the Iranian New Wave, Beyzaie created a cinema where myth and history, memory and imagination, are inseparably intertwined. Drawing from the deep well of Persian epics, folklore, ritual, and classical poetry—most notably the Shahnameh—he reimagined ancient narratives to speak to the urgencies of the present. His films and plays give rise to modern heroes and, most strikingly, to women of rare depth and resilience, who move with strength through the constraints of a patriarchal world.
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Language, in Beyzaie’s work, is never merely spoken—it is lived, remembered, and transformed. In DEATH OF YAZDGERD (1982), truth fractures into multiple voices, each retelling a history that refuses to settle. In THE BALLAD OF TARA (1979), the encounter between a living woman and a ghostly warrior unfolds through the tension of archaic and modern speech, evoking a love suspended between worlds.
Across his cinema, ghosts of people and places recur as persistent presences—guides, witnesses, and echoes of what cannot be forgotten. They linger in diverse locals that carry the weight of memory and loss. In Beyzaie’s vision, the past is never past—it breathes within the Present.
Despite censorship, restriction, and the banning of many of his works, Beyzaie continued to create with unwavering clarity and purpose. In his later films, he turned a sharp and unflinching gaze toward social reality, exposing corruption and reflecting on the fragile condition of Iranian cinema itself. In 2010, he left Iran and continued his work in the United States, teaching, writing, and staging plays while remaining deeply rooted in the culture that shaped him. Bahram Beyzaie leaves behind not only a body of work, but a poetic world—one where history trembles, language endures, and memory refuses silence.
—Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Festival Co-founder
