The first decade of the 21st century has been an extraordinary time for Iranian film-makers, starting with joint Caméra d’Or wins for Hassan Yektapanah’s Djomeh and Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses at the 2000 Cannes film festival. Since then we have been treated to such wildly differing visions as Rafi Pitts’s haunting It’s Winter, with its oddly epic sense of domestic turmoil, and Jafar Panahi‘s Offside, arguably the best football movie ever made. In 2008 Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis picked up an Oscar nomination, while in 2010 Cannes favourite Abbas Kiarostami steered Juliette Binoche to a best actress award in Certified Copy.
