Celebration of Iranian Cinema 2026: San Francisco Guide

San Francisco’s second annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema arrives at the de Young museum on Friday, September 25, and Sunday, September 27, 2026. Across four programs, the series pairs new feature films from Iran and the Iranian diaspora with prize-winning shorts. Every film is presented with English subtitles.

The program is presented by the Farhang Foundation in partnership with the UCLA Film & Television Archive. It is a compact but unusually varied window onto contemporary Iranian filmmaking: romantic satire, family drama, political thriller, social realism, animation, documentary, and stories made both inside Iran and in the diaspora.

Celebration of Iranian Cinema 2026: quick details

• Dates: Friday, September 25, and Sunday, September 27, 2026
• Venue: Koret Auditorium, de Young museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
• Address: 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118
• Programs: Four feature-and-short pairings, at 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. on each screening day
• Language: Persian or Kurdish dialogue with English subtitles
• Price: The organizer lists an individual price of $20; confirm the selected program and current availability during checkout
• Tickets: Use the official Farhang Foundation event page

Schedule and ticket information below were checked on September 23, 2026. Because event details can change, consult the official listing before traveling.

Friday, September 25: satire and a family reckoning

4:30 p.m. — Divine Comedy with Son

Ali Asgari’s Divine Comedy follows an Iranian filmmaker whose work has circulated internationally but remains barred from public screening at home. He and his producer take to the streets on a moped, trying to find a way around the permit system. The film uses the energy of romantic comedy to examine censorship, professional frustration, and the ingenious workarounds artists develop under pressure. This 98-minute Persian-language feature is a San Francisco premiere.

It is preceded by Saman Hosseinpuor’s 15-minute Kurdish-language short Son, the Farhang Short Film Festival Audience Choice Award winner. Set in Iranian Kurdistan, the story begins with a mother waiting for her son to return from military service and turns toward a discovery about identity.

7 p.m. — Oh, What Happy Days with Where the Winds Die

For viewers drawn to ensemble acting and diaspora family dynamics, Oh, What Happy Days may be the evening’s natural choice. Homayoun Ghanizadeh stages a confrontation among three generations of an Iranian family through a video call. A dispute over a family home in Iran pulls old secrets and betrayals into the open. The 107-minute Persian-language feature includes Golshifteh Farahani, Shirin Neshat, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Ali Nasirian, and Payman Maadi.

The program opens with Pejman Alipour’s 13-minute animated short Where the Winds Die. Using a watercolor-like visual style, it remembers the 1987 chemical attack on Sardasht in western Iran. The film received third prize at the Farhang Short Film Festival.

Sunday, September 27: exile, duty, and social pressure

4:30 p.m. — Mortician with Abraham

Mortician is the program’s clearest Iranian-diaspora story. Set in a Canadian winter, Abdolreza Kahani’s 95-minute thriller centers on Mojtaba, an Iranian émigré who performs Islamic ritual washing of the dead. After losing his job, he accepts an unusual request from an exiled Iranian pop star who is preparing a final public protest. The film won the audience-voted Sean Connery Prize at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and receives its San Francisco premiere here.

Before it, Elnaz Ghaderpour and Reza Gamini’s 14-minute Abraham follows a small-town police officer whose murder investigation exposes a family secret. It won second prize at the Farhang Short Film Festival.

7 p.m. — Woman and Child with The Granny and Fishes

Saeed Roustaee’s Woman and Child is the longest and most emotionally demanding selection. Parinaz Izadyar plays Mahnaz, a widowed nurse and mother whose hope for a new beginning is broken by tragedy and betrayal. The resulting struggle turns toward family authority, the school system, and the courts. The 131-minute Persian-language feature, co-starring Payman Maadi, is another San Francisco premiere.

The first-prize short The Granny and Fishes, directed by Maria Mavati and Ehsan Farokhi Fard, is a 27-minute documentary set around Lake Hamun on the Iran–Afghanistan border. As drought and water-management failures empty the landscape, an elderly woman remains among the dead fish and abandoned villages. Its attention to place and routine makes it a fitting counterpoint to a feature about endurance under institutional pressure.

Which screening should you choose?

If you can attend only one program, choose by tone rather than simply by star power:

• For satire and a story about filmmaking itself: Divine Comedy.
• For a large cast and a family story shaped by distance: Oh, What Happy Days.
• For an Iranian-Canadian setting and political suspense: Mortician.
• For an intense social drama centered on a mother: Woman and Child.

The shorts are not incidental warm-ups. Together they bring Kurdish-language storytelling, animation, crime drama, environmental documentary, and rural Iranian settings into a program otherwise dominated by feature-length Persian-language work.

Why this San Francisco program matters

The UCLA Film & Television Archive describes its annual series as a survey of recent and classic films from Iran and the Iranian diaspora. The San Francisco edition distills that broader Los Angeles program into four pairings while adding the winning films from Farhang’s short-film competition. That structure puts established directors beside emerging filmmakers and lets viewers encounter multiple regions, languages, and modes of production in a single weekend.

It also resists treating “Iranian cinema” as one fixed style. A comedy about screening permits, a video-call family drama, a Canadian exile thriller, and a documentary about Lake Hamun do not offer the same Iran—or even remain within Iran’s borders. What connects them is an attention to how private lives meet public systems: censorship, migration, war, environmental loss, law, family obligation, and memory.

Planning your visit to the de Young

The screenings take place in the museum’s Koret Auditorium, not in a commercial cinema. The de Young is in Golden Gate Park at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive. Because both evening programs begin after the museum’s ordinary daytime gallery hours, use the instructions in your ticket confirmation for event entry rather than assuming the main galleries or every entrance will remain open.

Allow time to reach the auditorium, especially for the 7 p.m. programs, and keep the ticket confirmation accessible on your phone. The four listings share one official ticket portal, so check the film title and start time carefully before completing a purchase.

If the weekend inspires you to keep exploring Iranian visual culture, Tute’s Persian Miniature Pattern T-Shirt draws on the layered storytelling of Persian painting, while the Azadi Tower Spiral Notebook offers a practical place for film notes and recommendations.

Sources and image credit

• Farhang Foundation: 2026 Celebration of Iranian Cinema in San Francisco — official schedule, synopses, subtitles, running times, ticket link, and price.
• UCLA Film & Television Archive: 2026 Celebration of Iranian Cinema — background on the annual curatorial series.
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: Visit the de Young — venue address and visitor information.

Image: The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, photographed by Guilhem Vellut on March 23, 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Cropped by Shopify for theme display where applicable; no other changes stated.