UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema: Inside Amir (2025)/Divine Comedy (2025)

Please note: Registration does not guarantee entry if the event reaches capacity. Admission is granted on a first come, first served basis.
Patrons who have registered will need to obtain their free tickets at the box office, where seating will be assigned. Any seats remaining 15 minutes before showtime will be released to standby patrons.

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Iran, 2025

After his girlfriend emigrates to Italy with the expectation that he will soon follow, bike messenger Amir (Amirhossein Hosseini) is still neither fully committed to leaving nor fully clear on what the future holds if he stays in Iran. Instead, he spends his in-between days hanging with friends who have themselves settled into a life of drift, playing poker, cooking meals together and biking around the city and country. Nothing ever really happens, which is precisely the point of writer-director Amir Azizi’s warm and loving portrait of a generation that has learned to embrace simple freedoms and pleasures where they can find them in a world where even that can feel like an act of resistance.

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 103 min. Director/Screenwriter: Amir Azizi. With: Amirhossein Hosseini, Hadis Nazari, Nader Pourmahin.

Iran, 2025

Iranian writer-director Bahram Ark (Skin, Animal) plays Bahram, an Iranian writer-director who has achieved fame on the international festival circuit but has yet to have one of his films screened in Iran. After his latest is again denied a permit, he and his producer Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari) set out on her moped determined to find a way to get it on screen with the help of a hodgepodge of decidedly eccentric characters. Bahram’s situation is all too familiar to co-writer-director Ali Asgari (Terrestrial Verses) and his regular collaborators here, who use romantic comedy tropes to illuminate the absurdities — and dangers — faced by filmmakers in Iran.

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 98 min. Director: Ali Asgari. Screenwriter: Alireza Khatami, Bahram Ark, Bahman Ark, Ali Asgari. With: Bahram Ark, Sadaf Asgari, Hossein Soleimani.

Event Venue

Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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