New Iranian Cinema

For more than six decades, in the face of censorship and even imprisonment, Iranian filmmakers have produced some of the world’s best-loved cinema. And now, with the legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s latest film It Was Just An Accident up for Oscar and BAFTA Awards, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode review this extraordinarily rich and unique cinema history. Mark speaks to the British-Iranian director Babak Anvari about his supernatural-thriller film Under the Shadow, inspired by his experiences growing up during the Iran-Iraq War, and how and why Iranian cinema has had such a huge impact on film culture. Ellen talks to Sepideh Farsi, who was forced to leave Iran for Paris as a teenager, about her 2009 documentary, Tehran Without Permission, which she made entirely independently on a Nokia cameraphone. And Ellen also meets Hassan Nazer, an Aberdeen-based Iranian director who came to the UK as a refugee and whose 2022 film Winners is a love-letter to his country’s film-making tradition. Producer: Artemis Irvine A Prospect Street production for BBC Radio 4

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New Iranian Cinema is an episode from Screenshot by BBC.

This episode is 42:21 long.

This episode was published on Jan 30, 2026.

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