Mendonça Filho's 'South of Tehran' Doc Premieres at NYFF
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- NYFF is launching the 'NYFF Encounters' initiative at its 64th edition (September 25–October 12), commissioning a director already in the lineup to shoot a new short at the festival for premiere at the following edition.
- Kleber Mendonça Filho directed the inaugural commission, 'South of Tehran,' an eight-minute documentary short filmed in a single day at NYFF 2025 while he was in town to screen 'The Secret Agent.'
- The short follows Jafar Panahi — currently imprisoned in Iran — through New York as he reflects on his film career and the persecution that led to his incarceration; Panahi was at NYFF 2025 for 'It Was Just an Accident.'
- The film takes inspiration from 'Pier Paolo Pasolini — Agnès Varda — New York — 1967,' the short Varda made about Pasolini during the fourth NYFF in 1967.
- Dennis Lim, NYFF's artistic director, proposed the commission and described the festival as 'a place of encounter,' saying the commissioned films are meant to form 'a historical archive as significant as our iconic poster collection.'
Why it matters: By choosing to build its new commissioning series around Panahi — a director who cannot freely make work from an Iranian prison — NYFF is signaling that the political imprisonment of filmmakers is core to the editorial identity of Encounters, not incidental. The Varda-Pasolini homage, meanwhile, ties the festival's contemporary mission to its 1960s legacy of filmmaker-to-filmmaker portraiture.
