Seven Days

This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series 2025 UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema.

Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival 3rd Prize Winner 

Neda Jebelli makes her directorial debut with this penetrating short film about an engagement party that goes off the rails. Shooting entirely in the kitchen where a conservative mother tries to hold things together as the cake delivery is delayed by street protests outside and her daughter refuses to sit with her fiancé, Jebelli makes sharp use of off-screen space and sound to underscore a sense of sweeping societal change. 

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 13 min. Director: Neda Jebelli. Screenwriter: Neda Jebelli.

A human rights activist in Iran, Maryam (Vishka Asayesh) has been imprisoned for six years when she’s granted a seven-day medical leave. When he learns of this from exile with their two children in Germany, her husband (Majid Bakhtiari) arranges to have her smuggled across the border where they will meet her. What seems like an extraordinary chance for freedom becomes for Maryam a heartbreaking moral dillemma: rejoin her family, including her teenage daughter, or remain in solidarity with the political movement she joined to fight for her daughter’s future. Directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi and written by Mohammad Rasoulof, Seven Days is a raw, intense exploration of the cost of resistance and freedom. 

DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 113 min. Director: Ali Samadi Ahadi. Screenwriter: Mohammad Rasoulof. With: Vishka Asayesh, Majid Bakhtiari, Tanaz Molaei.