EXCLUSIVE: Close to four years have passed since Iran’s Woman Life Freedom protests were sparked by the death in police custody, on September 16, 2022, of Mahsa Amini following her arrest for not wearing her hijab correctly.

In a sign of their lasting impact, Iranian director Mohsen Gharaei arrives in Venice this year with Falling House, a prophetic work warning of the crisis building in Iran after decades of oppressive, patriarchal rule by the Islamic Republic regime.

The allegorical drama, which world premieres in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, revolves around three generations of women in an economically fragile family, living under the thumb of the father and facing eviction from their long-time home due to an airport expansion project.

Initially appearing as a kindly, henpecked figure who affords his wife and daughters a fair amount of independence, the father reveals a more sinister side when they challenge his authority.

Laleh Marzban, whose credits include the 2023 Iranian Oscar submission The Night Guardian, stars as eldest daughter Ensi, who has hatched a secret plan to move to Turkey to pursue ambitions of becoming a model, opposite award-winning veteran actor Farhad Aslani as her father.

Rima Raminfar plays the long-suffering but determined mother, with Elena Khakbaz making her big-screen debut as the youngest daughter, Jenan, who is bullied at school over her father’s job amid claims that he is a prison executioner, but remains a beacon of hope as she challenges obstacles at every turn.

A first clip below, showing the family awakening to shaking walls and the rumble of bulldozer engines, captures the sense of a toxic status quo on the verge of collapse that runs throughout the film.

Falling House is Gharaei’s first film in five years, following a self-imposed hiatus in response to government restrictions and censorship around filmmaking.

He wrote a first draft in 2018 but reveals that it was the 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests that gave him fresh impetus to get the film off the ground.

“The protests happened four years later, but the reasons that led society to that point were already there. I’d always wanted to tell this story, but Woman Life Freedom gave me a better and stronger reason to bring it to film,” says Gharaei.

The film is one of two Iranian pictures playing in Venice, alongside Ali Asgari’s Golden Lion contender, A Bit Of Light, as Iran remains in the spotlight due to the war with the U.S. and Israel, as well as reports that its ruling Islamic Republic regime continues to persecute and execute pro-democracy dissenters.

Prior to his directing hiatus, Gharaei enjoyed box office chart-topping success at home with his respective 2017 and 2021 films, Blockage and Majority, with the latter winning the jury prize at the Islamic Republic regime-controlled Fajr Film Festival.

Today, he says he is living in exile, his home and assets confiscated, with him and his family subject to death threats after drawing the regime’s ire with public comments criticizing its conduct in the early days of the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in March 2026, and now with his new film.

“If I go back, I will definitely face a prison sentence,” says Gharaei.

Lead producer Milad Khosravi at Tehran-based Seven Springs Pictures, who joins Gharaei on the call as an interpreter, adds for context that the director has been the target of a “huge” disinformation campaign by government-controlled official media.

“They are aggressively threatening him, and he has received thousands of hostile messages on social media. Given the scale and intensity of the threats, it would be dangerous for him to return to the country.”

Khosravi is joined as co-lead producer by Odessa Rae of RaeFilm Studios (The Voice of Hind Rajab), who brought Max Richter onto the film, with music by Richter.

News in July of the Venice selection for Falling House sparked outrage on Iranian regime-controlled news sites following the posting of images from the film showing Marzban not wearing a hijab, in a direct challenge to Islamic Republic rules requiring women to cover their hair.

Gharaei notes that while he has never liked making women wear the hijab on his sets, it was not the main issue for him as he navigated government restrictions and censorship to get the production off the ground. Rather, it was the film’s searing critique of Iranian patriarchal society under the Islamic Republic regime.

“More than the hijab, the biggest issue was the concept of the film and the core of the story… the regime would never have allowed us to make the film… that was the biggest challenge,” he says.

Given the size of the production, Gharaei says it would have been impossible to shoot the film clandestinely, so he had to go down the route of securing a state production permit.

“We had to find a way of working with the authorities,” he says. “In the end, we gave them a kind of fake script to get the written permission that allowed us to shoot the film, to have all the cast and crew on the set, and to make the film we wanted to make.”

Mindful of the fact that Iran’s Production Permit Council can send in inspectors, or even place informers on set, Gharaei shot sensitive scenes with a reduced crew.

“For scenes without a hijab or with sensitive dialogue, I allowed only a handful of people on set,” he says. “The risk of anything leaking to the government was simply too great.”

“For the scenes without the hijab, it was sometimes just me with Laleh and the cameraman, or sometimes we pretended we were rehearsing or practicing, which was also safer.”

Some regime detractors have suggested that the film’s setting of a house on the verge of being reduced to rubble is an insensitive reference to the U.S.-Iran war and even an insult to the memory of the country’s late supreme leader Ali Khomeini, who was killed on February 28 in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike on his official residence in Tehran.

Gharaei dismisses the claims, pointing to the fact that he wrote the first draft of the screenplay in 2018, with the shoot beginning in November 2025 and wrapping in January 2026, just as widespread pro-democracy protests kicked off. He notes, however, that the film does foretell the war.

“I’ve always thought that, given the way my country and the government are dealing with others, its neighbors and everything, war was unavoidable… the film is indirectly showing that,” says Gharaei.

The Islamic Republic regime would go on to quash the pro-democracy protests in a brutal crackdown, which is believed to have left some 30,000 people dead. A second wave of protests began in mid-February but came to a halt with the U.S. and Israeli military campaign.

With all eyes around the world on Iran’s next steps, amid questions over whether the regime will fall or survive, Gharaei says the ultimate interpretation of the film lies with the spectator.

“The film is not saying that a war is needed. I didn’t seek to answer whether the war is a solution or not. I just show exterior forces sitting there, ready to attack and take advantage of this home at the same time as the pressure of the dictatorship and patriarchal system bears down… With all my films, my main goal and first responsibility as a director, is to tell a story and to tell it well. The social and political layers come after, with people bringing their own understanding to it.”