Roya Nonahali Movies

Iranian director Mona Zandi helmed her gritty, hard-bitten family drama Friday Evening from a script authored by Farid Mostafavi. Roya Nonahali and Mehrdad Sedighian co-star as Sougand and Omid, a single ex-con and her bastard teenage son, sharing house in Tehran. Prone to swiping cash from his mother's purse and constantly missing school, Omid teeters on the verge of unabashed juvenile delinquency. More broadly, the emotional barriers projected by the adolescent and his mother leave an icy void between them that widens with each passing day. When Sougand's emotionally stable and conservative younger sister, Banafsheh (Haniyeh Tavasoli), arrives in the city to study at a local university, and visits Sougand and Omid, she immediately senses the issues that plague her sister and nephew, and begins to guide the two toward deep, lasting reconciliation. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Iranian social issues are intimately explored in this thoughtful prison drama from director Manijeh Hekmat. When midwife Mitra (Roya Nonahali) is sentenced to an extended stay in prison for the murder of her mother's abusive husband, devout Muslim warden Tehereh (Roya Taymourian) delivers a series of punishments in hopes of breaking the young offender, including a harsh reprimand for delivering a baby in her cell while prison guards take shelter during an Iraqi bombing raid. Gaining a bit of respect for Mitra when she attempts to save a new inmate from a brutal rape, Tehereh plays a protective role when Mitra's juvenile delinquent daughter, Sepideh (Pegah Ahangarani), is imprisoned years later. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara wrote, directed, and stars in this autobiographical drama of an artist reaching beyond the limits of censorship. Farjami (Farmanara) is a movie director living in Iran who has not been permitted to make a picture since the Post-Revolutionary Censor Board came into effect two decades earlier. Suffering from a serious cardiac condition, Farjami is convinced he does not have long to live, so he makes plans for one final project -- a film on burial rites, which may or may not include his own funeral. Farjami's new production, which requires him to research the nuts and bolts of burial practices, at once forces him to come to terms with his mortality and leads him to yet another conflict with the authorities determined to prevent his self-expression. Farjami also encounters a woman who shares with him a terrible secret -- and unwittingly implicates him in her wrongdoings. Booye Kafoor, Atre Yas is Farmanara's first film since Saiehaieh Bolan De Bad in 1979.
~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This political allegory managed, by some miracle, to escape the attention of the religious censors of Iran's post-Khomeni regime and was shown in 1989 at the Locarno Film Festival. In the story, a news photographer who has been wounded in the course of covering the Iran-Iraq war is recovering at home. he is haunted by what he has seen in the various wars he has covered. In addition, he is entirely disenchanted with the new post-Pahlavi political regime. He and his daughter proceed to chronicle the desperate state of Tehran's poor, which has remained unchanged for decades. In doing so, he has (as have the filmmakers) put together a damning indictment of the current regime's claims for itself. Of course, once he has taken these photos, no one wants to publish them. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi