From the Vault: Crimson Gold

Filmmaker Jafar Panahi (whose latest film, It Was Just an Accident, took home the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival) begins his fourth feature, Crimson Gold, with a botched robbery-suicide, committed by delivery driver Hussein, played with Bressonian flourish by real-life deliveryman and Iran-Iraq War veteran Hossain Emadeddin. Following this powerful opening sequence, the film backpedals to detail the small moments of humiliation and harassment endemic to everyday life in Tehran that gradually build to unsustainable levels for Hussein before his fateful encounter in a jewelry store. Penned by fellow Iranian maverick Abbas Kiarostami, this ripped-from-the-headlines story has been compared to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver for its vivid delineation of a city whose social fabric is fast unraveling. Presented on a 35mm print from the FSC's collection. (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2003, 96 minutes, 35mm)

“Panahi is a seeker more than a finder, and what he has to say about the modern world in general and contemporary Iran in particular can’t be reduced to a simple message.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

“Panahi’s concern isn’t so much with the violent crime foreshadowed in the film’s harrowing opening sequence as with the rage intrinsic to postwar Iran’s class divisions and the ultimately fatal hold it takes on the country’s marginalized people.” (New York Film Festival)

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open thirty minutes prior to showtime.