Director: Majid Majidi, Abbas Kiarostami, Dariush Mehrjui
Cast: Reza Kianian, Leila Otadi, Ramzali Dadvar, Sadegh Damyar, Hossein Eskandari
Farshe Irani is a 2007 Iranian documentary omnibus film produced by Iran's National Carpet Center and Farabi Cinema Foundation, uniting fifteen of Iran's most celebrated directors — including Majid Majidi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Dariush Mehrjui — around a single, ancient subject: the Persian carpet.
What is Farshe Irani about?
Fifteen short films, each by a different Iranian filmmaker, examine the Persian carpet from a distinct angle. Some segments trace the hands of weavers in remote villages, watching a lifetime of pattern and color take shape thread by thread. Others look at the carpet as object — inherited, traded, displayed, worn thin — and at the households and histories it passes through. Still others approach it as language, reading the geometry of medallions and borders the way a scholar reads a manuscript. Together the segments build an argument: that the carpet is not decoration but document, carrying geography, tribal memory, and artistic will in every knot. The film never converges on a single thesis; instead it offers fifteen distinct ways of seeing something most viewers walk across without a second thought.
Cast & crew
The film is structured as an omnibus with fifteen directing contributors; the credited anchors are Majid Majidi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Dariush Mehrjui, three pillars of Iranian cinema whose individual bodies of work span decades of international recognition. On-screen, the film features Reza Kianian, Leila Otadi, Ramzali Dadvar, Sadegh Damyar, Hossein Eskandari, Yoones Farzaneh, Melika Janesari, and Shabna Moghaddam.
Context & significance
For Iranians living outside Iran, the Persian carpet is one of the most loaded objects in domestic life — present in grandparents' living rooms, sold at estate sales, carried across borders in luggage. This film speaks directly to that weight. Made with the institutional backing of the Farabi Cinema Foundation, it brings the kind of artistic seriousness to the carpet that the carpet has always deserved but rarely received on screen. For diaspora viewers, watching directors they grew up with — filmmakers who shaped their understanding of what Iranian storytelling could look like — train their attention on this single cultural artifact is a rare experience. The omnibus format means no single style dominates; the film is wide enough to hold both the intimate and the analytical, the rural weaver and the urban collector.
Where & how to watch
Farshe Irani is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. No VPN is required, and there is no geo-blocking — watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone. Membership can be cancelled at any time.