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Returning to Sundance, where her debut feature Circumstance premiered in 2011, Iranian-American writer-director Maryam Keshavarz enters the festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition with a crowd-pleasing quasi-autobiographical comedy-drama, The Persian Version.

A multi-generational family tale that spans roughly 60 years, two continents and assorted cultures from traditional Muslim families to queer New Yorkers, this lively, likable, if somewhat on-the-nose work grabs viewer attention with fourth-wall-breaking monologues, jocular explanatory graphics, and tightly choreographed dance numbers to vintage American and Iranian pop songs. The expansive ensemble is led by Layla Mohammadi playing the director’s alter ego Leila and Niousha Noor as her immigrant mother Shirin, who, in the manner of classic melodrama, clash but learn to respect one another by the end after secrets are revealed in extended flashbacks.

The film’s present tense is somewhere in the early 2000s, its locus Brooklyn, downtown Manhattan and Jersey City, where protagonist and sometime narrator...

Give me a break! Speed Dating The film debuts Saturday, December 10, 2022, on YouTube. The horrors of dating are vividly brought to life in the opening scenes of Jean-Paul Ly's short film. Utilizing a swirling camera, we are introduced to Emma (Eloise Lovell Anderson), who has unwillingly agreed to a night of 'speed dating,' only at the insistence of her best friend, Katy (Mia Foo). Sitting calmly at a table in a restaurant, Emma must endure a string of male losers who sit down opposite her and endeavor to engage her in conversation bragging about their imagined qualities. Really, they're offensely boorish, and, frankly, watching them made me feel embarrassed about my own identity. Things swiftly change when a stranger enters the restaurant, with...

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