José Arroyo and Richard Layne on Filmfarsi (Ehsan Khoshbakht), WOW Festival

A discussion of Filmfarsi, a film by Ehsan Khoshbakht, of a mode of filmmaking extremely popular in Iran -- urban gangster films, melodramas, musicals -- set in urban working class milieus, that evoked and challenged the country's vaunted leap in modernity. It's a cinema quickly banned after the '79 revolution, and a cult on VHS. The filmmaker shows the wide range of filmmaking, its transnational perspective, its ritual and fetishistic post -79 consumption, and well evokes why it was so powerful, why it's been banned and why it is so cherished.