Mania Akbari’s From Tehran to London (2012), has a Russian-doll structure. It begins with Akbari shooting her latest film entitled Women Do Not Have Breasts about a couple, the young poet and writer Ava and her upper-class older husband Ashkan, who live in a large, beautiful – yet isolated – house in the hilly outskirts of the city. Household workers Maryam and Rahim attend to their needs. But despite their comfortable lives, Ava is increasingly dissatisfied and estranged in her relationship with Ashkan. What seems to have been an exciting relationship in the past is now little more than a series of mutual reproaches, as Ashkan incessantly tries to change Ava into someone she isn’t – a dutiful wife.
Tap a face for their filmography
Tap a face for their filmography
2016
A young Oxford academic and his attorney girlfriend holiday in Morocco. They bump into a Russian millionaire who owns a peninsula and a diamond watch. He wants a game of tennis. What else he wants propels the lovers on a tortuous journey to the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's intelligence establishment, to Paris and the Alps.
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2024
In 1979, amidst censorship and religious extremism, a revolutionary literature professor in Tehran gathers seven of her most dedicated female students to immerse themselves in banned literary classics.
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2021
A young journalist in London becomes obsessed with a series of letters she discovers that recounts an intense star-crossed love affair from the 1960s.
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2006
Set in a blighted, inner-city neighbourhood of London, Breaking and Entering examines an affair which unfolds between a successful British landscape architect and Amira, a Bosnian woman – the mother of a troubled teen son – who was widowed by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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2003
A fiery Spanish woman is about to marry a kind British man when she meets a Brazilian actor who ignites in her a flame of lust she can't ignore.
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1990
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, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
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2024
Iranian female judokas Leila and her coach Maryam, travel to the Judo World Championship, intent on bringing home Iran’s first gold medal. Midway through the Judo World Championships, they receive an ultimatum from the Islamic Republic ordering Leila to fake an injury and lose, or she will be branded a traitor of the state. With her own and her family’s freedom at stake, Leila is faced with an impossible choice: comply with the Iranian regime as her coach Maryam implores her to do, or fight on, for the gold.
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1991
An American woman, trapped in Islamic Iran by her brutish husband, must find a way to escape with her daughter as well.
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2017
London, England, April 1980. Six terrorists assault the Embassy of Iran and take hostages. For six days, tense negotiations are held while the authorities decide whether a military squad should intervene.
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2015
A chronicle of Gertrude Bell's life, a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer, and political attaché for the British Empire in the Near and Middle East at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her knowledge of the tribal leaders is used by the British to establish the Kingdoms of Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
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2015
In this adaptation of the critically acclaimed debut novel by Iranian American author Dalia Sofer, a secular Jewish family is caught up in the maelstrom of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
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2019
A shy but ambitious film student falls into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man.
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1999
Bill, an idle, unemployed aspiring writer, walks the crowded streets of London following randomly chosen strangers, a seemingly innocent entertainment that becomes dangerous when he crosses paths with a mysterious character.
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2003
A British crime novelist travels to her publisher's upmarket summer house in Southern France to seek solitude in order to work on her next book. However, the unexpected arrival of the publisher's daughter induces complications and a subsequent crime.
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2007
A Russian teenager living in London dies during childbirth but leaves clues in her diary that could tie her child to a rape involving a violent Russian mob family.
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1919
The love story of an abused English girl and a Chinese Buddhist in a time when London was a brutal and harsh place to live.
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2023
While investigating the global phenomenon of caste and its dark influence on society, a journalist faces unfathomable personal loss and uncovers the beauty of human resilience.
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1979
A young woman who is determined to maintain her independence finds herself at odds with her family who wants her to tame her wild side and get married.
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2021
Filmed live on Broadway, the Tony Award-winning musical tells the remarkable true story of 38 flights grounded in a small Canadian town on September 11, 2001. As the locals host these “come from aways,” they come together and find hope.
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1950
Londoner Harry Fabian is a second-rate con man looking for an angle. After years of putting up with Harry's schemes, his girlfriend, Mary, becomes fed up when he taps her for yet another loan.
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