Kamran Shirdel was born in 1939 and studied first architecture and then film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. After graduating in 1964, Shirdel returned to Tehran and joined a group of film-makers producing documentaries for the Ministry of Culture. Over the next few years, Shirdel produced six films which frankly analyzed and revealed the dark side of society by making use of a social consciousness familiar from Italian neo-realism. All these films were immediately banned, in certain cases the material was confiscated during production. Shortly after the revolution of 1979, the films and the unedited material were released for a short time and Shirdel was able to finish the films.

For more than 30 years, Kamran Shirdel had to limit his activity to making commissioned films for the industry. Only in 2001, he produced his next author’s film, “Solitude Opus 1”. In 2000 Shirdel created the Kish Documentary Film Festival which offers a platform to Iranian documentary film-makers.

You can watch all Shirdel classics on Docunight On-Demand: Women’s Prison, Women’s Quarter, Tehran Is The Capital Of Iran, The Night It Rained, and Solitude Opus 1.

During the past 6 years, one question I kept getting was “where can we watch these films”? Mostly, the answer was, unfortunately nowhere. There were many challenges, from running a continuous streaming service to a different licensing and all other limitations and challenges that come with anything we do with that part of the world. Besides that, there were many great older documentaries, such as Kamran Shirdel’s films, or Ebrahim Mokhtari’s trilogy, that were not suitable for our monthly screenings but are very valuable films and should be available. Last but not least, I was frequently asked about Docunight screenings outside of North America, which, unfortunately, was not possible. All those questions and requests have been addressed now.

I’m happy to announce Docunight On-Demand, a subscription-based service (for $6.99) focused on Iranian documentaries. We are starting with about 40 films, and will be adding more films every month. We expect to have 150-200 documentaries by the end of the year, a mixture of old and new documentaries, films that we have or have not screened at Docunight before, ALL AVAILABLE INTERNATIONALLY. For a better watching experience, we have TV apps for all major streaming platforms as well: Roku and Amazon FireTV apps are ready and can be downloaded now, and the Apple TV app will be ready by the end of this week. You can find links to our On-Demand service on our brand new website: www.archive.docunight.com.

For our monthly screenings, even though it’s not possible to watch films together on big screens, we are restarting our monthly screening, now called Docunight On-Screen, by adding a limited online screening option. As we did before, every month we will pick a documentary to screen, now available online for one week only. In this new version of Docunight On-Screen, we will have an online Q&A with the director or other people involved in the film. These Q&As will be streamed live, and you will have the opportunity to ask your questions.

It’s important to note that our On-Screen films are different than our On-Demand service. While we hope to eventually add our On-Screen films to our On-Demand service, because of the different licensing model, there’s no guarantee or set time for having these films available on our On-Demand platform.

We will have a separate post for this month’s On-Screen service, which I’m personally very excited about.

I hope you enjoy our brand new Docunight On-Demand, and our extended Docunight On-Screen. Please go to archive.docunight.com to sign-up for either or both!

(Please note that we are still working on the website. Kindly, please take a minute to let me know if you saw any mistake or missing information. Thank you.)

We are making a large selection of Iranian documentaries available on Docunight On-Demand and will continue adding new titles every month. The initial list is a selection of some of the films we have screened at our events in the past 6 years, as well as some new titles.

Please join our Docunight On-Demand and start watching Iranian Documentaries anywhere, in your browser, or on your TV using AppleTV, Roku, or Amazon FireTV!