The life of Saideh Ghods changed completely when her two-year-old daughter Kiana was diagnosed with cancer. As she confronted her daughter’s suffering, she became aware of the suffering of so many impoverished families in hospital corridors around the country who were dealing with children afflicted by cancer. When, due to the doctors’ timely diagnosis, Kiana was on the path to a full recovery, Saideh Ghods resolved to prevent the unnecessary deaths of children with cancer caused by lack of access to therapeutic facilities or insufficient financial resources.

Ghods founded MAHAK over 25 years ago. It quickly gained fame and support throughout Iran. Today it is one of the most highly functioning and trusted charities in the country. Countless children have been helped and saved.  A few years after founding MAHAK, Ghods, along with a group of Iranian philanthropists, established a fully equipped hospital in Tehran that specializes in treating children with cancer.

Residents of One Way Street is a documentary about the lives and memories of six residents of one street in Tehran: The current ‘Si-ye Tir’ or the former ‘Qavam-o-Saltaneh’ Street, located in District 12 of Tehran. This street is situated between City Park in the south and Jomhoori Avenue in the north. The street was originally named ‘Qavam-o-Saltaneh’ because the residence of Qavam os-Saltaneh, a prominent politician of the Qajar and Pahlavi eras, was located on it. After the Revolution in 1979, the street was re-named as Si-ye Tir (30th of Tir) to commemorate those who got martyred on that day in 1952 and who were killed during the time Qavam-o-Saltaneh was the Prime Minister. The street is one of the oldest in Tehran and in the past, people of different religions lived on it. Places of worship belonging to different religions and sects (Armenian Christians and other Christians, Jews, Muslims and Zoroastrians) can be found on this street. Now all that remains from the residents of the street are memories and photo albums.

“Of all the movies I’ve seen this year, the one that has stayed most strongly with me is Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa.”
– Martin Scorsese

“Taking pictures of other people, whether they are suffering or celebrating, is a complex undertaking, even though (or perhaps precisely because) the act of pointing a camera and pressing a button is so simple. Mr. Kiarostami’s genius is to capture both the simplicity and the complication. The richness and emotional impact of ’‘ABC Africa” comes partly from the balance it achieves between the director’s personality (he appears occasionally, middle-aged, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and rarely without a camera) and his vast, terrible subject. He never pretends to have mastered the subject – the film’s title suggests the elementary state of his knowledge – or to be able to solve Uganda’s problems by observing them. But you come away from his film overwhelmed, hopeful and, perhaps paradoxically, illuminated.“
– A. O. Scott, The New York Times

Over the course of a ten-day visit to Uganda, Abbas Kiarostami uses his camera to capture and caress the faces of a thousand orphans. Although a documentary about the ravages of AIDS and civil war in Uganda may seem at first like a radical departure, one of the most remarkable things about ABC Africa is the way that Iran’s most celebrated auteur makes such unlikely material very much his own.

In true Kiarostami style, an impressionistic, deceptively simple record of a journey becomes the film itself. This striking visual poem is full of echoes from his oeuvre: the hypnotic tracking shots from car windows, the dirt-road villages, the majestic landscapes and, above all, the emphasis on the resilience and resourcefulness of children.

Alternately heartbreaking and optimistic, ABC Africa records a people struggling to survive. Filled with laughter and music, and pulsing with life, Kiarostami’s vision attests to Africa’s sunny spirit

Four directors of different ages and levels of experience, each present a view of the Kahrizak Charity Centre, introducing us to fascinating characters and rituals, and a reflection on life and death itself. Presented in episodes, we are introduced to the situation of the elderly; a blind and disabled man without hands and legs, who performs Hamlet; and the Centre’s Feast of Sacrifice.