A single mother lives with her five-year-old, mute son in a high-rise area in the middle of the metropolis. In order to pay her rent and for the divorce from her jailed husband, she works as a prostitute but pretends to be a nurse on a night shift. She shares her secret with her pregnant neighbour, a bored housewife, who takes care of her son but also hopes to find a way out of her everyday life. A young music student also lives in the same neighbourhood but gets into trouble after a one-night stand with an 18-year-old virgin.

“TEHRAN TABOO is a spellbinding animated journey into the underbelly of Iranian society where nothing is what it seems from the outside. It would pay US media to watch films like Soozandeh’s once in a while. In fact, it would pay us all to do so, since we could walk away enriched by its wisdom. But the filmmaker’s genius here lies not in preaching, rather in thoroughly entertaining us, from the delicious rotoscope animation to the powerful use of characters that jump off the screen and into our conscience.” (Huffington Post)

Ali Soozandeh was born in 1970 in Iran. He earned a degree in media design at the University of Cologne/Germany in 2005 and founded CARTOONAMOON Film Production. Since then he has worked as a freelance filmmaker. He is responsible for numerous activities in the short, feature films and documentary. TEHRAN TABOO premiered at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival and the “EUROPEAN SCRIPT AWARD 2017 for the Most Innovative Script of the Year by a Newcomer for a Film”.