Two Secretly Filmed Iranian Dramas Reach the Venice Stage as War Reshapes the Country’s Screen
Kabarsaji.com – The Venice Film Festival lineup this year carries an unusual weight: two feature-length dramas that were shot clandestinely inside Iran, capturing the texture of daily life under a regime now locked in open military conflict. Their arrival on the Lido’s red carpet is less a routine premiere than a small act of cultural survival — a reminder that cinema can still be made, smuggled out, and shown to the world even when the state tries to silence it.
The Films and Their Stories
Mohsen Gharaei’s Falling House centers on a modest family living on the fringes of Tehran. Their neighborhood is slated for demolition under a government rebuilding program, and the film follows the slow collapse of their home — both literal and figurative — as the walls come down around them. The narrative is intimate, domestic, and quietly devastating: a family watching its own shelter disappear while the machinery of the state grinds forward regardless.
Ali Asgari’s A Bit of Light takes a different angle on the same pressure. It tells the story of a physician in Tehran whose practice is shut down after he is arrested by Iranian authorities. Stripped of his profession and his sense of purpose, the doctor confronts a future that no longer seems possible. The film interrogates what happens to individual identity when the system removes every avenue of agency.
Odessa Rae, who produced Falling House and serves as executive producer on A Bit of Light, framed the shared emotional core of both projects in a statement carried by trade press:
“Both films deal with this feeling of being trapped and what do you do when you’re inside a system where there’s really no way out?”
That sense of enclosure is reinforced within A Bit of Light itself. In a pivotal scene, a character assisting the doctor delivers a line that anchors the film’s present-tense dread:
“This Trump guy is threatening to bomb here every day.”
How the Films Were Made — and Smuggled Out
The production conditions behind both pictures were anything but conventional. To secure filming permission for Falling House in Tehran, principal producer Milad Khosravi — an Iranian filmmaker now based in Istanbul, where he operates the production company Seven Springs Pictures — had to present a modified version of the script to government censors. The approved text was not the one the crew actually shot. For roughly seventy days, the team worked under that cover, accumulating footage while the true narrative remained hidden.
The window for extraction was narrow. The crew managed to get raw material out of Iran only days before the war began. Post-production work, along with a handful of additional scenes, was completed in Germany. Khosravi described the logistical tangle in his own words:
“We had a really complex situation shooting the film both in Tehran and Istanbul.”
The situation grew more acute in February, when the United States launched its first strikes against Iran. At that point, Khosravi said the physical production of A Bit of Light had to be relocated to the United States, adding another layer of geographic fragmentation to an already scattered shoot.
Exile, Travel Bans, and the Question of American Promotion
Khosravi, Asgari, and Gharaei are all currently living outside Iran. Each is promoting his or her film’s Venice premiere from exile. A travel ban imposed by the Iranian government complicates any plans to carry the films into American theaters or festival circuits. Whether the pictures will receive a U.S. run remains uncertain — a practical consequence of the very political conditions the films depict.
Khosravi has stated plainly that he expects no further major Iranian features of this caliber to emerge from within the country. The crackdown, he argues, has effectively closed the door on the kind of ambitious, politically engaged filmmaking these two works represent. His stated intention is to continue telling comparable stories from abroad, keeping a thread of Iranian cinematic voice alive even if the domestic industry cannot sustain it.
Why This Matters Beyond the Festival Circuit
Venice has long served as a proving ground for international art cinema, and its programming choices signal which voices the global industry considers urgent. Placing two war-affected Iranian dramas side by side in a single edition is a curatorial statement: it tells audiences that the conflict is not merely a headline but a lived, embodied experience that reshapes kitchens, clinics, and family rooms. The films do not ask viewers to take sides in a geopolitical argument. They ask something more uncomfortable — to sit inside the feeling of having no exit.
For Iranian filmmakers working in diaspora, the Venice premiere also functions as a lifeline. It validates years of clandestine labor, offers a platform from which distribution negotiations can begin, and keeps the country’s cinematic tradition visible at a moment when the state is actively working to erase it. Whether or not the films eventually reach American screens, their presence in Venice ensures that the stories themselves have already crossed the border — smuggled out on memory cards, carried across continents, and set down, finally, on a stage where the world can watch.
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