South of Tehran

“You Should Never Take Cinema For Granted”

Filmmaker Jafar Panahi recalls the cinephilia of his youth from the surreal remove of the 2025 New York Film Festival. This is the first film in an annual initiative titled NYFF Encounters, a commissioning program that invites one filmmaker with a film in the New York Film Festival to create an original short during the course of the festival. Selected by the festival’s Artistic Director and programming team, the participating filmmaker will produce a short film shot at least in part at NYFF.