Cinema Museum

Iranian cinema began with a shah on vacation in France. When Mozaffar al-Din Shah encountered moving pictures at a private screening in the spa town of Contrexéville on July 8, 1900, he was captivated. The shah ordered his court photographer, Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi, to purchase a motion-picture camera. A few weeks later, Akkasbashi pointed it at a flower parade in Ostend, Belgium, capturing what is believed to be the first film ever shot by an Iranian cameraman.

Cinema followed him home. Back in Tehran, Akkasbashi filmed royal processions and the lions at the shah’s zoo, images that marked the birth of what would become one of the world’s most celebrated national cinemas.

Today, that history has a home to match. The Cinema Museum of Iran occupies an ornate Qajar-era mansion in Tehran’s Ferdows Garden, a sprawling retreat whose story stretches back to the reign of Mohammad Shah Qajar in the mid-19th century. Since 2002, its plasterwork-covered rooms have traded royal residents for reels, posters, cameras and decades of Iranian film history.

The collection includes some 40,000 photographs, thousands of screenplays and historical documents, along with early filmmaking equipment and the personal effects of directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Bahram Beyzai. Together, they trace the century-long story that began when one shah brought a camera home from Europe and Iran turned it into an art form.