Last evening was the opening night of the 34th UCLA CELEBRATION OF IRANIAN CINEMA (JUNE 5–21, 2026) – at the Billy Wilder Theater of the UCLA Hammer Museum. The opening night screening was Abrolera Kahani’s award-winning film “Mortician” (Canada/Iran, 2025). This Iranian-Canadian tragicomedy directed by Abdolreza Kahani follows a reclusive Iranian émigré in Canada who performs the Islamic ritual washing on the bodies of deceased expatriates in Toronto, whose quiet life is disrupted when an exiled dissident singer seeks his help for a final public protest.
Winner of the top prize at the 2025 Edinburgh Film Festival, Kahani’s work is of a piece with that of bigger-name compatriots like Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof in its protest against the Iranian government, though his droll-to-devastating approach is very much his own. Kahani is a prolific, iconoclastic artist who has been steadily making films since the early 2000s, Kahani won awards at Thessaloniki and Karlovy Vary earlier in his career, but has had his last three films banned in Iran – leaving to Kahani’s desire to leave the country for good. He now lives in London.
“Mortician” reunites Kahadi with Nima Sadr, his leading man from last year’s “A Shrine” — a gently hulking, wonderfully lugubrious figure with a sloping mustache that pulls his whole face into a permanently mournful cast. (“A Shrine” was his screen debut; in just two films, he’s established a distinct and lingering screen presence.) He plays Mojtaba, a former Tehran resident living a sparse, solitary life in a wintry, unidentified Canadian city. Eking out a living washing corpses awaiting burial, in line with Muslim tradition, he sends most of his earnings back home to his family in Iran. It’s meager work, and about to get more so. The funeral company that employs him is closing down, and his boss — who has found a new job doing, he admits, nothing at all — advises him to return to Iran.
Scrambling for an alternative gig, he finds there are other bodies that require his skills, not all of them deceased. A most generous and peculiar offer comes from Jana (Iranian-born, U.K.-based pop singer Gola), a musician and fellow exile persecuted by the Iranian government for her fiery anti-authoritarian songs: She is planning to kill herself at some point in the near future, and wants Mojtaba to make her a beautiful corpse when the time comes. Jana loves life, she is quick to clarify — but suicide is the most prominent and public form of protest available to her, given her reliance on video-based social media to communicate with the outside world from her icy rural rented house.
This is not just another dystopian satire, but a tale alive with humanity and flickers of dry humor as the awkwardly matched pair come to understand each other. Gola, whose character is based on her own experiences as an expatriate former Iranian pop star and political activist is glamorous and clever, and came from a well-off moneyed background. Mojtaba, on the other hand, comes from a family living in poverty in Tehran supporting his own parents and his 9 siblings. He is used to be benignly passive and accommodating to others.
They both have been mutually betrayed by their distant homeland, which continues to infringe on their freedom in far-reaching ways. “People aren’t like you — they’re complex,” Jana says to Mojtaba, more kindly than the sentiment implies, and he doesn’t altogether disagree. “I tend to become like the people I work for, but you’re always yourself,” he admits with shy admiration.”
Mortician” is for the most part an intimate, exploratory two-hander, as a macabre business arrangement evolves into a closer, more interdependent relationship between two people caught between the same two worlds — though their connection stops shy of improbable romance.
This is a film made with an iPhone and shaped by the aesthetics of pocket-device cinematography. It frames shots with intimate never careless, attentive to the pale desolation of the surrounding landscape and the stark dimness of Jana’s home. The surprising ending throws the cast of characters into a different light, as it belongs apparent that it is not possible to escape from the Iranian government’s outreach.
The closing credits are essential to its message and experience — not merely a short scroll of names, but an idiosyncratic directorial manifesto in which Kahani individually honors his collaborators, earnestly apologizes to actors who didn’t make the final cut, and finally thanks himself “for refusing to take money from the government of Iran.”
After the screening, the was a live Zoom Q&A with the director Kahani and the lead actress Gola (Golazin Ardestani), who plays Jana in the film. Born and raised in Iran, she began her musical journey by joining Orchid, Iran’s first all-female girl band. Because solo female singing is legally prohibited in public by the Iranian regime, she was arrested three times. She fled into self-exile in 2011 to freely pursue her music career. Often referred to as the “Lioness of Iran,” she uses her platform to advocate for the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. She sings in both Farsi and English and is the founder of Zan Recordings, a music label dedicated to empowering female artists.
