Fifteen of Iran's most celebrated directors each point a camera at the same subject — the Persian carpet — and no two of them see the same thing. Farsh Irani (2007) gathers their short films into a single 117-minute mosaic, produced by Iran's National Carpet Center together with the Farabi Cinema Foundation.
What is Farsh Irani about?
Rather than telling one story, the anthology unfolds as a sequence of self-contained segments, each signed by a different filmmaker. Some sit beside weavers at the loom, recording the patience of hands that tie thousands of knots before a single rug is finished. Others treat the carpet as woven memory: the garden knotted into its border, the prayers and family histories, the years of a weaver's life absorbed into wool and silk. A few segments drift toward essay or fiction, using the carpet as a doorway into questions about art, labour, and what a nation chooses to carry forward. Seen together, the pieces form a group portrait of a craft — and of the people whose lives are tied into it.
About the cast
The names credited on screen — Ramzali Dadvar, Sadegh Damyar and Hossein Eskandari — appear across the segments rather than anchoring any single storyline, faces glimpsed within the worlds these films observe. The real ensemble stands behind the camera: the fifteen contributing directors include Behruz Afkhami, Rakhshan Banietemad and Bahram Beyzaie, three filmmakers whose careers together span a remarkable range of Iranian cinema, from popular drama to rigorous art film.
Context & significance
The Persian carpet is one of Iran's oldest continuous art forms, and every region — Tabriz, Kashan, Isfahan, the nomadic weaves of the Qashqai — carries its own vocabulary of pattern and colour. Commissioning fifteen auteurs to honour that heritage made Farsh Irani a rare institutional project that doubled as an artistic experiment, and it remains one of the most distinctive omnibus films Iranian cinema has produced. It earned a solid, unshowy reception — no small feat for a commissioned documentary anthology.
Watching Farsh Irani on Ktime
Farsh Irani streams on K-Time with a free account login — this page is open to every reader, and signing in unlocks playback. K-Time's Farsi-first interface is built for Persian speakers abroad, so a documentary like this sits alongside the rest of Iranian cinema in one library, wherever in the world you press play.