Press room

Wed 4 Feb – Thu 26 Feb 2026

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Following the sell-out season celebrating the classics of Cinema-ye Motafavet, or Iranian New Wave, Barbican Cinema presents an even richer array of rare gems in the second programme of Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave between 4-26 February. Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, who will introduce all the films, this follow-up programme of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema explores sexuality, identity and oppression with a candour unmatched in any other period of Iranian cinema. The programme is presented with support from the Iran Heritage Foundation and is a highlight of the Barbican’s Spring 2026 season.

Featuring 11 titles across 8 events, all screening in Cinema 1, this second series includes films never before screened in the UK, UK premieres of five newly restored films, plus a world premiere. 

The opening night event presents the only surviving fragments of Shahla Riahi’s Marjan (1956), the first Iranian film directed by a woman, screening alongside the UK Restoration Premiere of Bahram Beyzaie’s The Ballad of Tara, banned in Iran since its production. Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave will close with the World Premiere screening of Cineteca di Bologna’s brand-new restoration of Ebrahim Golestan’s Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure (1974).

The season also features two earlier works highlighting the collaboration between Ebrahim Golestan and Iran’s great modernist filmmaker and poet Forough Farrokhzad. In a programme of films from the Iranian documentary movement, Golestan’s breathtaking A Fire (1961) is edited by Forough Farrokhzad, whose lyricism blends seamlessly with Golestan’s symbolic approach, and in Courtship (1961), an episode of a Canadian anthology on courtship rituals around the world, Forough Farrokhzad makes her sole screen appearance, six years before her death in a car crash aged 32.

Also featured is the UK premiere of the joint restoration by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna of The Postman (1972), by the great Dariush Mehrjui, who was tragically murdered in 2023.

This survey of Iranian New Wave film also features works by masters such as Abbas Kiarostami, Kamran Shirdel and Nosrat Karimi, revealing an extraordinary breadth of style and tone.

Ehsan Khoshbakht, Curator of Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave, said: “Some of the films in this programme have taken more than half a century to be seen in the way they were intended to be seen – or, in some cases, to be seen at all. The stylistic and political boldness of these films helps explain where contemporary Iranian directors draw their inspiration. If you are wondering who Behrouz Vossoughi is – the actor to whom Jafar Panahi recently dedicated his latest film – come to the Barbican and see The Deer, a work that marks the origins of a cinematic new wave evolving into an angry, poetic, militant cinema.”

Alex Davidson, Barbican Cinema Curator, said: “The Barbican’s 2025 season on Iranian New Wave, also curated by Ehsan, was one of the most popular in our cinema’s history, with every screening selling out our biggest screen. This follow-up programme boasts even greater riches – the word ‘masterpiece’ is over-used, but here, it accurately describes these fascinating works”.

PROGRAMME:

The Ballad of Tara (Cherike-ye Tara) (UK Restoration Premiere) + Marjan (15*) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Iran 1979, Dir Bahram Beyzaie, 1hr 42min, In Persian with English subtitles
Wed 4 Feb 6.10pm
Cinema 1

Never before seen in Iran, and screening here for the first time in a brand-new restoration, Bahram Beyzaie’s The Ballad of Tara seamlessly fuses myth, symbolism, folklore and classical Persian literature to unfold like a feminist re-reading of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epics.

Tara is a strong-willed widow who encounters the fleeting apparition of an ancient warrior in the forest near her village. The ghostly figure pursues her relentlessly, seeking to reclaim a sword she has inherited from her father. Yet once the warrior falls in love with Tara, he finds himself barred from returning to the realm of the dead. The film’s completion coincided with the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent Islamist takeover, leading to its indefinite suppression. It was not its political allegory that troubled the authorities so much as its vision of a woman both desired and sovereign over her fate – an image intolerable to the fanatics.

The Ballad of Tara is Beyzaie’s final pre-revolutionary feature, and the first of his works to be fully centred on a woman: a figure of almost ethereal presence, portrayed with unforgettable poise by Susan Taslimi. As the film prepared for its premiere, the revolution intervened and the film was abruptly banned.

Screening with:

Marjan
Iran 1956, Dir Shahla Riahi, 18 mins, in Persian with English subtitles

The only surviving fragments of the first Iranian feature directed and produced by a woman – Shahla Riahi, who also stars as the titular character, a nomadic girl who falls for the village schoolteacher. Their impossible love sets the stage for an inevitable tragedy.

The Postman (Postchi)(15*) (UK premiere) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Iran 1972, Dir Dariush Mehrjui, 1hr 50min, In Persian with English subtitles
Thu 5 Feb 6.15pm 
+ Sat 21 Feb 3.30pm (no introduction)
Cinema 1

Dariush Mehrjui’s Iranian New Wave classic – yet screening here for the first time in the UK courtesy of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project – The Postman sharply critiques Iran’s heedless Westernisation and the tragic consequences born of a collision between corrupting modernity and an ineffectual, unravelling tradition.

Inspired by Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, The Postman follows Taghi (Ali Nassirian, in a bravura performance), a timid, subservient postman living with his wife Monir in a remote corner of northern Iran. Taghi also serves as part-time manservant to the local landowner, Niattolah. When Niattolah’s Western-educated nephew returns to remodel his uncle’s dairy farm into a more profitable pig enterprise, he seduces Monir – a betrayal that hastens Taghi’s harrowing descent into madness.

Allegories are woven into satire and while the film may be read as a testimony to class repression, it ultimately expresses a deeper fear of all things human. The film possesses an uncanny ability to shift almost imperceptibly from symbolic satire to a metaphysical realm, as the camera slowly surrenders to Taghi’s fractured psyche – where his terrified and terrifying subjectivity becomes our own. 

Journey (Safar) + A Wedding Suit (Lebasi Bara-ye Arousi) (12A*) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Sat 7 Feb 2026, 3.30pm
+ Tue 17 Feb, 6.30pm (no introduction)
Cinema 1

Loneliness and the experience of being orphaned, yet yearning for care and connection, lie at the heart of these two powerful films from Bahram Beyzaie and Abbas Kiarostami. Two restored classics from Kanoon (the Iranian centre specialising in producing films for and about children) offer lessons in cinematic modernity from these leading figures of the Iranian New Wave.

Journey (Safar)
1972 Iran, Dir Bahram Beyzaie, 35 mins, in Persian with English subtitles

A 12-year-old orphan with a habit of seeking out his potential parents takes his friend along on a journey through the wastelands on the outskirts of Tehran.

A Wedding Suit (Lebasi Bara-ye Arousi)
1976 Iran, dir Abbas Kiarostami, 60 mins, in Persian with English subtitles

Set in a three-story arcade in downtown Tehran, this suspenseful, almost Hitchcockian film follows a tailor’s assistant who secretly lends a friend a suit made for the son of an affluent family – only to find himself unable to retrieve it as the deadline for the customer’s collection approaches.

The Carriage Driver (Doroshkechi)(15*) (UK Premiere) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Iran 1971, Dir: Nosrat Karimi, 1 hour 57 min, In Persian with English subtitles
Sun 8 Feb, 2.30pm
Cinema 1 

Marriage, Iranian style! The UK premiere of Nosrat Karimi’s The Carriage Driver – one of the finest examples of Iran’s classic popular comedies that so often revolved around sex and the many obstacles tradition and religion placed in its path.

Complications arise when the marriage of young lovers Morteza and Pouri becomes contingent on an awkward condition: Morteza must first approve the union between his recently widowed mother and Pouri’s father.

Nosrat Karimi’s film draws, with remarkable dexterity, on Italian pink neorealism, Iranian filmfarsi, and the mischievous spirit of Czechoslovak cinema – the latter most visible in a dream sequence enlivened by an unexpected burst of animation, a nod to Karimi’s years of study in Prague. With warmth and sharp wit, Karimi delivers a critique of Iranian society, using its entrenched anxieties around namus (the “virtue” of the family’s women) as fertile ground for comedy, while playfully skewering such everyday rituals.

The Deer (Gavaznha)(15*) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Iran 1974, Dir Masoud Kimiai, 2 hrs 5min, In Persian with English subtitles
Wed 11 Feb, 6.10pm
Cinema 1

Masoud Kimiai’s cult classic embodies everything remarkable about Iranian cinema of the 1970s: political, provocative, sincere, furious and tragic. 

The tale of a former champion turned heroin addict who reunites with a leftist classmate –and finds a final, incandescent form of redemption through revolutionary rage – remains shockingly bold, even militant, especially given its place at the very heart of mainstream Iranian cinema. At its centre stands Behrouz Vosoughi, the era’s most versatile method actor and a megastar, delivering one of the defining performances of his career.

Premiering at the Tehran International Film Festival in November 1974, The Deer was banned for two years and allowed back into theatres only after Kimiai shot a new ending. Both endings will be screened at this event.

The Night It Rained (Onn Shab ke Baroon Omad) + two documentary shorts by Ebrahim Golestan (PG*) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Tue 24 Feb 6.30pm
Cinema 1

Three classics from the golden age of the Iranian documentary movement.

Two films by Ebrahim Golestan explore the relationship between earth, people, and the cycle of life and death in a uniquely poetic manner. 

Kamran Shirdel’s The Night It Rained renews the moral bite and ironic sensibility of Golestan’s work in a sharply satirical story. 

A Fire (Yek Atash)
Iran 1961, Dir Ebrahim Golestan, 24 min, in Persian with English subtitles

A breathtaking depiction of the efforts to extinguish a fire at an oil well. The film was edited by poet and future filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad, whose lyricism blends seamlessly with Golestan’s symbolic approach.

The Hills of Marlik (Tappe-haye Marlik)
Iran 1963 , Dir Ebrahim Golestan, 15 min, in Persian with English subtitles

A 3,000-year-old site in the north of Iran is simultaneously excavated by archaeologists and fertilized by farmers. The found objects come to life to tell their own story.

The Night It Rained (Onn Shab ke Baroon Omad)
Iran 1967, Dir Kamran Shirdel, 38 min, in Persian with English subtitles

A newspaper story claims that a village boy heroically prevents a train disaster. As officials and journalists dispute the account, doubt spreads, leading to confusion over who saved whom.

Dancer of the City (Raghase-ye Shahr) (UK Premiere) + Courtship (Khastegari) (15*) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Wed 25 Feb, 8.30pm
Cinema 1
Dancer of the City

Iran 1970, Dir Shapour Gharib, 2 hours 2 mins, In Persian with English subtitles

A vivid and exhilarating account of the thwarted pursuit of artistic freedom and a woman’s independence within a religiously conservative society. Starring two giants of Iranian popular cinema, Forouzan and Nasser Malek Motie, the film showcases the talents of the prolific yet undervalued director Shapour Gharib, who would later give Asghar Farhadi one of his earliest writing jobs in cinema. Gharib draws upon the increasingly fashionable New Wave tendencies of the time. 

Screening with:

Courtship 
Iran 1961, Dir Ebrahim Golestan, 10 mins, in English

The Iranian episode of a Canadian anthology on courtship rituals around the world. Directed by Ebrahim Golestan – a forebear of the Iranian New Wave shown here in a lighter, more playful mode – this is especially significant for featuring poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad as the groom’s sister. Although the patronising voice-over was later imposed by the Canadian producers, the film endures as a fascinating snapshot of its era.

Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure (12A*) plus introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Iran 1974, Dir Ebrahim Golestan, 2 hrs 10min, In Persian with English subtitles
Thu 26 Feb, 8.30pm
Cinema 1

This political satire – the final cinematic work of director Ebrahim Golestan – places the ills of a society gone off balance under a comic magnifying glass. 

A Monty Python–esque allegory about the corrosive impact of petrodollars on Iranian life, The Secret Treasures of Jinn Valley follows a villager who discovers a hidden fortune, becomes rich overnight, and swiftly transforms into a tyrant.

The film’s troubled history began even before its release. Golestan felt compelled to conceal the story during production to avoid the inevitable misreadings of his intentions; yet when the film finally reached cinemas, those very readings led to its ban –  though one may fairly ask whether they were misreadings at all. Featuring several major stars of the era — among them comedian Parviz Sayyad and Mary Apick – Golestan re-edited the film but the version he considered definitive was never publicly screened… until now. This screening marks the world premiere of the brand-new restoration of the film’s director’s cut), co-funded by the Iran Heritage Foundation.

Closing Night is presented in partnership with the Iran Heritage Foundation