iCM Forum's Favorite Middle East Movies - Sep 2018 (all votes)

A married couple are faced with a difficult decision - to improve the life of their child by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer's disease.

The true story of Hossain Sabzian, a cinephile who impersonated the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to convince a family they would star in his so-called new film.

An Iranian man drives his car in search of someone who will quietly bury him under a cherry tree after he commits suicide.

A semi-autobiographical account of Makmahlbaf's experience as a teenager when, as a 17-year-old, he stabbed a policeman at a protest rally. Two decades later, he tracks down the policeman he injured in an attempt to make amends.

After a boy loses his sister's pair of shoes, he goes on a series of adventures in order to find them. When he can't, he tries a new way to "win" a new pair.

A group of men set out in search of a dead body in the Anatolian steppes.

The mysterious disappearance of a kindergarten teacher during a picnic in the north of Iran is followed by a series of misadventures for her fellow travelers.

An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.

Eight-year-old Ahmed has mistakenly taken his friend Mohammad's notebook. He wants to return it, or else his friend will be expelled from school. The boy determinedly sets out to find Mohammad's home in the neighbouring village.

A hotel owner and landlord in a remote Turkish village deals with conflicts within his family and a tenant behind on his rent.

While Ranaa and Emad, a married couple, are participating in a production of "Death of a Salesman," she is assaulted in their new home, which leaves him determined to find the perpetrator over his wife's traumatized objections.

An enterprising Saudi girl signs on for her school's Koran recitation competition as a way to raise the remaining funds she needs in order to buy the green bicycle that has captured her interest.

When five orphan girls are seen innocently playing with boys on a beach, their scandalized conservative guardians confine them while forced marriages are arranged.

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.

A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.

The story of Mohammed, a blind Iranian boy and his father, Hashem, who is always oscillating between accepting his son as he is and abandoning him, as he represents a burden for him, after the loss of his wife.

A depiction of the off-screen relationship between the actors who play the newlyweds in the film And Life Goes On (1992).

A newspaper salesman at the train station in Cairo develops an unhealthy obsession with a woman who sells refreshments.

Near the Iraqi-Turkish border on the eve of an American invasion, refugee children, like 13-year-old Kak (Ebrahim), gauge and await their fate.

Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness", of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.

An Iranian pizza delivery man sees the worst of corruption and social unbalance in his city and is driven to crime.

Various women struggle to function in the oppressively sexist society of contemporary Iran.

Makhmalbaf puts an advertisement in the papers calling for an open casting for his next movie. However when hundreds of people show up, he decides to make a movie about the casting and the screen tests of the would-be actors.

Banned from making movies by the Iranian government, Jafar Panahi poses as a taxi driver and makes a movie about social challenges in Iran.

On the last Wednesday before the spring solstice ushers in the Persian New Year, people set off fireworks following an ancient Zoroastrian tradition. Rouhi, spending her first day at a new job, finds herself in the midst of a different kind of fireworks -- a domestic dispute between her new boss and his wife.