The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will present the 32nd Festival of Films from Iran, a series of five films, including two films short-listed for Academy Award nominations.

Schedule of events

• January 24: The Stranger and the Fog (Gharibeh Va Meh) - Iranian New Wave director Bahram Beyzaie's visually ravishing masterwork - banned for decades after the Iranian revolution - is set around the northern coast of Iran, where a boat drifts onto the shore of a small village. Its unconscious passenger, Ayat, is revived by the villagers but has no memory. After proving himself as a member of the community, Ayat marries the widow, Rana. Ayat then grows increasingly paranoid about hallucinatory figures vowing to avenge his past misdeeds.
• January 25: The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Danaye anjir-e moabad) - Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof was facing eight years in prison for creating films that criticized the government before narrowly escaping to exile in Europe. Shot entirely in secret, Rasoulof’s award-winning thriller centers on a family thrust into the public eye when Iman (Missagh Zara) is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. As political unrest erupts in the streets, Iman realizes that his job is even more dangerous than expected, making him increasingly paranoid and distrustful, even of his own wife and daughters who are following the protests on their phones. This timely drama received the Jury Special Prize at Cannes and is short-listed for an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature.
• January 26 (2 pm): 6 A.M. (Sa'ate 6 Sobh) - Sara (Samira Hassanpour) lives in Tehran and has been accepted by a PhD program at a Canadian university. She has a 6 a.m. flight to catch, but her friends have planned one last party before she leaves Iran. What follows is a tense social drama depicting a group of people celebrating their friend’s success while the guest of honor worries about her early flight the next day. Sara’s anxiety is heightened when an unexpected visit from the police puts her future in jeopardy.
• January 26 (5 pm): Universal Language (Une langue universelle) - In a town somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg everyone speaks French or Persian. Stories begin to overlap: children try to liberate money frozen in the ice, a man guides befuddled tourists through historic sites of Winnipeg, and a government employee (Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin) quits his job in a Québecois government office to set out upon an enigmatic journey to visit his mother. Rankin and Iranian writers Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati won the inaugural Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at Cannes for this absurdist comedy that variously evokes the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Wes Anderson, and Guy Maddin. Universal Language is also short-listed for an Academy Award for Best International Feature.
• January 31: My Stolen Planet (Sayyareye dozdide shodeye man) - Using the essayistic style of a diary, director Farahnaz Sharifi traces how the Islamic Revolution changed life for women in Iran. Born in 1979, shortly after the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, Sharifi draws on home movies and found 8mm recordings of strangers’ lives to show moments of private joy and public defiance under the regimented oppression in Tehran. Throughout, she portrays Iranian women with humanity and complexity, sharing her love for her country’s textures while refusing to be diminished by repressive religious and government structures.