Iranian

If there were one thing that might deter you from taking up your old man’s profession, it would surely be him being arrested, imprisoned, harassed and alienated for more than a decade for practising it.And then imprisoned again. Reiterating the madness into which Panah Panahi has chosen to enter, his father, the renowned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi, was this week sentenced to serve a stayed six-year prison sentence after inquiring about the detention of two fellow directors.A few weeks before this episode of…

Image via Disney The Cars franchise features some of Pixar’s most financially successful movies and has spawned a mountain of merchandise, toys, and tie-ins. But that’s not all the Cars franchise has produced. It has also created a mountain of fan theories that question why the world is only populated by sentient cars, and today, Reddit is debating a new fan theory that asks how similar Lightning McQueen’s world is to ours. In a thread titled “The Cars universe had a 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis.” Reddit user…

In the opening frames of Little America — the new Apple TV+ anthology series, out next Friday — Asha Bhosle's eighties disco hit “Udi Baba” plays over the opening credits. The song has nothing to do with what we're about to see, but it sets the stage for the first episode. Titled “The Manager”, written by Rajiv Joseph (Draft Day) and directed by Deepa Mehta (Elements trilogy), it follows a first-generation Indian immigrant named Kabir Jha — played by Suraj Sharma (Life of Pi) as an adult — whose life is torn apart after…

The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, continued to process trades by clients in Iran despite US sanctions and a company ban on doing business there. In 2018, the United States reimposed sanctions that had been suspended three years earlier as part of Iran's nuclear deal with major world powers. That November, Binance informed traders in Iran it would no longer serve them, telling them to liquidate their accounts. Seven traders said they skirted the ban. The traders said they continued to use their Binance accounts…

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan & Iranian model Mahlagha Jaberi Are Doppelgangers (Photo Credit–IANS) Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has a doppelganger in Mahlagha Jaberi and fans on social media can’t stop talking about the uncanny resemblance between the two. Aishwarya‘s lookalike is identified as the 33-years-old Iranian-American fashion model who is based out of California. She is also a sensation on Instagram where she has a following of 4.1 million. Mahlagha Jaberi has walked the red carpet at…

Andrew Deck / Rest of World: Report: Iranian #MeToo activists on Instagram are being targeted by 1M+ bots in a coordinated harassment campaign using social media marketing firms in Pakistan — A new report suggests the attacks are part of a coordinated campaign using Pakistani social media marketing firms. Andrew Deck / Rest of World: Report: Iranian #MeToo activists on Instagram are being targeted by 1M+ bots in a coordinated harassment campaign using social media marketing firms in Pakistan …

A war, big or small, can transform a society beyond recognition. American sociologist Charles Tilly argued that war helps the state perpetuate itself by adding new layers of state-ness. Beyond this, war sometimes helps advance the cause of feminism. The world wars of the twentieth century created conditions for waves of feminism in the European heartland. We now hear stories of bravery, resilience and sacrifice by Urkainian women in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. And yet, there is little scientific research on the…

Hackers sponsored by the Iranian government last year attempted a "despicable" cyber attack against Boston Children's Hospital that threatened to disrupt services to patients, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Wednesday.Wray, in a speech delivered at a conference hosted by Boston College, detailed the incident as he warned about the rising threat cyber attacks sponsored by nation states like Iran, Russia and China pose to companies and US infrastructure."We got a report from one of our intelligence partners indicating…

Iranian film-maker Saeed Roustayi delivers a big, absorbing, character-driven family drama in the Italian-American style with fierce performances, a huge set-piece wedding scene and touches of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Coppola’s The Godfather. There’s even some Arthur Miller amid the angry, painful recrimination.We get a blistering turn from Taraneh Alidoosti – known for her work on movies by Asghar Farhadi – playing the Leila of the title: a woman driven to distraction by the indolent, incompetent patriarchy.…

Holy Spider is a serial killer procedural which takes the procedure further than usual, despite its deployment of some pretty familiar tropes. It goes beyond the denouement and the arrest, extending the murderer’s conceited theatre of cruelty to the police cell, the law courts and the media arena.This is a fictionalised true-crime drama-thriller based on Iranian construction worker Saeed Hanaei, nicknamed “Spider Killer” in the press, who in 2001 was arrested for the murder of 16 sex workers in the northeastern city of…