Movies: Mohsen Makhmalbaf

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, ...

After the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the restriction of women in public life, a preteen girl is forced to masquerade as a boy in order to find work to support her mother and grandmother....

After an Afghanistan-born woman who lives in Canada receives a letter from her suicidal sister, she takes a perilous journey through Afghanistan to try to find her....

Filmmakers from all over the world provide short films – each of which is eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame of film in length – that offer differing perspectives on the 9/11 terrorist attacks....

A semi-autobiographical account of Makhmalbaf's experience as a teenager when, as a 17-year-old, he stabbed a policeman at a protest rally. Two decades later, he tracks down the policeman he injured in an attempt to make amends....

An elderly couple go about their routine of cleaning their gabbeh, while bickering gently with each other. Magically, a young woman appears, helping the two clean the rug. This young woman belongs to the clan whose history is depicted in the design o...

Khorshid, a blind child growing up in Tajikistan, is constantly distracted by music and sounds. This frequently causes him to be late to his job as an instrument tuner even though he runs the risk of being fired at a time when his family is in danger...

After twelve years of imprisonment by their own parents, two Iranian sisters are finally released by social workers to face the outside world for the first time....

The President is the story of a dictator of an imaginary country in the Caucasus, who is forced to escape following a coup d’état, and begins a journey to discover his country in the company of his five-year-old grandson. The two travel across the la...

Makhmalbaf puts an advertisement in the papers calling for an open casting for his next movie. However when hundreds of people show up, he decides to make a movie about the casting and the screen tests of the would-be actors....

The wife of Nasim, an Afghan immigrant in Iran, is gravely ill. He needs money to pay for her care, but his day labor digging wells does not pay enough. A friend connects Nasim to a two-bit promoter who sells tickets to watch Nasim ride a bicycle con...

Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offer...

Nogreh is a young Afghani woman living with her father and her sister-in-law, Leylomah, whose husband, Akhtar, is missing. Beyond the issue of Akhtar, Leylomah is most concerned with how to feed her baby. She cannot provide milk for her baby as her o...

A girl reaches the age of nine and is supposed to act as a grown woman according to her family. A girl participates in a bike race against the will of her husband. An elderly woman decides she wants to buy all the things she always wanted but could n...

A wealthy boy hires a poor child to carry him around like a horse....

Haji is severely traumatized by the war with Iraq. Back from the front, he's unable to adapt to civilian life. Despite family opposition, his fiancée stands by him as together they challenge both the authority of family and state to lead their own li...

A female election agent and a gun-toting soldier try to collect votes among the local islanders with mixed success....

A girl believing in God marries an atheist, who is consumed by doubt. They decide to spend their honeymoon in India......

Documentary showing the life of children of the Afghan villages bordering Iran, and how their life and culture were affected by Taliban regime....

A nostalgic look at the birth and death of arthouse film distribution in the early 2000s in Russia. The story of the Cinema Without Borders company and its two founders, Sam Klebanov and Anton Mazurov....