A Glimpse of Iran Through the Eyes of its Artists and Journalists

"The protagonist, the Iran-born but American-raised Cyrus Shams, has struggled with addiction, depression and insomnia his whole life, and is trying his best to make sense of a world at the "intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness." As with so many other of the titles here, fiction and fact are woven together: the story centers around the true story of the U.S. downing an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war."

"This 2019 documentary directed by Iranian film maker Taghi Amirani and co-written by Walter Murch recounts Operation Ajax, in which the CIA and Britain's MI6 engineered the removal of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran's democratically elected prime minister, and installed a friendly ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place. (The Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution.)"

"Marjan Kamali's 2019 love story is the wistful tale of a young woman named Roya and an idealistic activist named Bahman, who meet cute in a Tehran store in the 1950s, but whose planned marriage falls apart due to turmoil both familial and political, as Iran's democratically elected government falls in a U.S.-British led coup that ends with the installation of the Shah."

Contemporary Iranian-American cultural works address complex themes of displacement, identity, and historical consequence. Haleh Liza Gafori's Rumi translations offer accessible spiritual contemplation, while Kaveh Akbar's debut novel follows an Iran-born protagonist navigating addiction and the intersection of Iranian and American identity, anchored by the true story of a 1988 U.S. military incident. Marjan Kamali's love story traces a relationship fractured by the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup that installed the Shah. Taghi Amirani's documentary details Operation Ajax, revealing how Western intervention fundamentally altered Iran's political trajectory and shaped subsequent generations' experiences of displacement and loss.

Read at Kqed