Director: Mitra Farahani
Cast: Jean-Luc Godard, Ebrahim Golestan, Ashi Esfandiary
See You Friday, Robinson is a 2022 Franco-Iranian documentary directed by Mitra Farahani, capturing an extraordinary long-distance exchange between two towering figures of world cinema: legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard and Iranian literary and cinematic pioneer Ebrahim Golestan, conducted over months via video messages and facilitated by artist Ashi Esfandiary.
What is See You Friday, Robinson about?
Over the course of several months, filmmaker Mitra Farahani orchestrates a transatlantic conversation between two men who shaped twentieth-century cinema from radically different vantage points. Jean-Luc Godard, in his late eighties and based in Switzerland, and Ebrahim Golestan, past his ninety-seventh year and living in England, exchange recorded video messages — each responding to the other's words, images, and silences. What emerges is less a debate than a meditation: on what art demands of the person who makes it, on the century both men witnessed and helped define, and on the strange persistence of curiosity and creative drive in old age. Ashi Esfandiary moves between them as witness and interlocutor, giving the film its human warmth.
Cast & crew
Director Mitra Farahani is an Iranian-born visual artist and filmmaker working across France and Lebanon, known for building intimate documentary spaces around extraordinary subjects. Jean-Luc Godard, co-founder of the French New Wave, needs little introduction; his presence here, recorded shortly before his death in 2022, lends the film an unmistakable elegiac weight. Ebrahim Golestan, now in his late nineties, remains one of Iranian cinema's founding voices. Ashi Esfandiary serves as the connective thread between both men.
Context & significance
For the Iranian diaspora, this documentary carries a particular charge. Ebrahim Golestan is the grandfather of modern Iranian cinema — a figure who made serious, literary film in Iran before the revolution, then lived for decades in British exile. Watching him in conversation with Godard, equal to equal, is a reminder that Iranian cultural production was never peripheral to world cinema. The film asks what the artist owes the world, what the world owes the artist, and how two men from opposite ends of the planet arrived at the same stubborn commitment to images and meaning. It screens at a moment when Persian-speaking audiences abroad are rediscovering that lineage.
Where & how to watch
See You Friday, Robinson is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles. Stream it on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, no extra download required. Subscription can be cancelled anytime.