Bravery on the streets of Tehran and in The Friend’s House
Daniel Nelson
There are many reasons to see The Friend’s House Is Here.
It was shot in secret on the streets of Tehran, with cast and crew under the threat of arrest if caught.
Shortly before filming began, 50 armed officers raided the home of a well-known filmmaker. The day the shoot was completed, the home of another prominent filmmaker was raided.
The film is a rare family collaboration: the co-directors are a husband-and-wife team, Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei. The executive producer is Hossein’s sister, Maryam Keshavarz. The directors were in Tehran with their six-year-old daughter when the June 2025 US attack on Iran started.
It was smuggled out of Iran through Turkey.
It offers a view of Iran that is rarely glimpsed.
But the best reason for watching the film is that it’s entertaining, pleasing to the eye, positive, humane and a joy to watch.
The slice of Tehran life on which it focuses is a small group of underground actors: young, educated, fun-loving, sociable, artsy, committed; hair not headscarves. Their milieu is trendy cafes, fashionable shops, art galleries, theatre spaces with no seats.
The camera picks out two of them, friends who share a flat: Pari, the serious writer and actor who holds the experimental group together, and Hanna, a vivacious, free spirit dancer who plans to leave for freer shores.
Their friendship and the actors’ relationships in the group is playful but mutually respectful. They are people whose company you enjoy.
Then, inevitably, the regime intrudes, in the guise of a quiet-spoken, tall, handsome stranger. He begins a devastating conversation with Pari after a performance of her new play, with the words, “It was an interesting piece”, a non-committal phrase that immediately but silently shouts “Trouble”. He references Brechtian theatre and good and bad acting, but it quickly becomes clear that his real objective is to threaten Pari.
The confrontation sparks a worrying sequence of events that could crush both Pari and Hanna.
Even at this point,when the film opens up to brief scenes of the “other” Tehran (“Please fix your hijab”), the film manages to stay positive, a reflection of the wider society’s resilience to the regime’s dour repression.
Zan Zendegi Azadi — "Woman, Life, Freedom" indeed.
Winner of the Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The film screens at BFI London Film Festival on 11 and 13 October.