Life Imitates Art Imitating Life in Stunningly Brave Iranian Protest Film

The act is innocent, the implications are deadly. Hana (Hana Mana) freely dances in the street with a porkpie hat in front of the damaged Baghdad Tower, a structure which became a symbol of anti-government sentiment, in 2019. She is filmed by her boyfriend, Ali (Farzad Namavari), who looks on, longingly. It is a casual expression in any other circumstance; here, it is punishable by death.

Few films have ever felt as tied to the context in which it was made and distributed as the essential and gorgeous The Friend’s House is Here. The Iranian film finished production a week before the beginning of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it had its World Premiere, and had to be smuggled across the Turkish border so that it could be sent over the internet. An extraordinary film of uncommon bravery, it acts as a protest by the nature of its very existence, a story of underground artists refusing censorship and authoritarianism in favor of a life lived with joy in truthfulness.

The Rich Detail of The Friend’s House is Here is Matched Only By Its Courage

In more than title alone, partner filmmakers Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei reference Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is The Friend’s House?, the 1987 film about an eight-year old on a perilous, almost mythical journey to bring his friend his notebook before their teacher finds out and expels him. If Kiarostami’s masterpiece was an implicit rebuke of a governmental system which prizes discipline over morality, then Keshavarz and Ataei respond with something more explicit, suggesting that we need not look for where community lies. We simply must protect it.

In Kiarostami’s film, an old man waxes poetic about the need for regular beatings of children. His friend naively asks, “What if he’s done nothing wrong?” To which the old man responds, “You come up with something. So that he doesn’t forget.” With Iranian forces practicing something like collective punishment on its own innocent population, Kiarostami’s charge has only become more prescient; so, too, is Keshavarz and Ataei’s film a necessary battle cry in a time of great uncertainty.

What’s most fascinating about The Friend’s House is Here is that it makes its protest heard through a story that remains adamantly vivacious for nearly its entire runtime. In the vein of a Richard Linklater-inspired hangout film, it primarily stays within the youthful vigor of an underground theater troupe led by Hana and her best friend, Pari (Mahshad Bahram), an art curator. The two build performance art pieces which deftly portray both the persistence of liberated life and the terror of existing in the current regime.

Much of the political threat lays on the margins of the film — not unacknowledged but brazenly ignored. Hana and Pari make art, shop, dance, eat lunch without their hijabs on, and sing to their heart’s content. Hana prepares to immigrate to Paris, an excruciatingly difficult process to go through considering the circumstances, and builds a budding love with Ali. They host dinners with homemade tadigh, they smoke cigarettes and flirt.

Keshavarz and Ataei trust that its audience will at least be passingly aware of the danger inside Iran, and so the clandestinely shot film transforms moments of innocuousness into abject terror. What happens if they are seen doing these things? For much of the film’s runtime, it seems astonishing that anyone might consider their lives uncouth, or that their simply performed lives are arrestable.

Life imitates art imitates life, as the performance piece which the group has been inconsistently working on seems to replicate itself in reality. Pari is arrested by the secret police, and Hana bands together with their friends to secure bail money, considering along the way if she’s willing to sacrifice her dream of living in France in order to do so. Cinematographer Ali Ehsani keeps his camera mostly fixed in place, allowing us to witness these people’s lives, so filled with warmth, and at other times, slowly pans or else zooms to signify the ever-closing walls.

Both Hana and Mana and Mahshad Bahram are on the front lines of the current Iranian protests, and their status is uncertain. So, too is the fate of a nation, and a question fuels the film as it does the Iranian people’s everyday lives: does it mean anything to survive if you have to sacrifice who you are? When Pari’s mother pleads with her to stop making art, the good-natured request feels absurd. How do you abandon yourself? Keshavarz and Ataei suggest that survival is not dependent on staying hidden. Its dependent on living out loud.

The Friend’s House is Here screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.