Best in the West (2006)
556 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
Director: Maryam Kashani
*7/29/09*

Director Kashani’s first-person documentary focuses on her father and his close-knit group of male friends who maintained their tight bonds after emigrating from Iran to San Francisco in the 1960s and ’70s. Their personal stories are interwoven with a political and industrial history of Iran and the struggle to control the country’s most coveted natural resource: oil.

Chelsea Art Museum is proud to present the Iran Inside Out Film Series in collaboration with Rooftop Films and ArteEast. This film series will present brilliant feature and short films as well as documentaries by well-established and emerging Iranian directors that are designed to compliment CAM’s ground-breaking exhibition, Iran Inside Out. The films are organized thematically to match the exhibition’s five pillars: war and politics, gender and sexuality, culture as commodity, reinventing traditional art forms and street culture within Tehran.

The screenings will take place every Wednesday at 9 pm from July 15 until August 19 in the Chelsea Art Museum’s magnificent gallery space.

Iran Inside Out features 35 artists living and working in Iran alongside 21 others living in the Diaspora. The result is a multifarious portrait of 56 contemporary Iranian artists challenging the conventional perceptions of Iran and Iranian art. In Iran Inside Out, 210 works comprising painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation come together, not merely as a political statement. Rather, as an opportunity that allows visitors to formulate their own views on what makes up the people of Iran, from inside and outside a country that is at the center of a global controversy.

The Chelsea Art Museum , a nonprofit charitable organization, strives on presenting contemporary thematic exhibitions inspired by current social, political, and cultural events. Rooftop Films was founded in 1997 and has come to be known internationally as one of the most dynamic film festivals in the world. ArteEast is a New York-based international nonprofit organization supporting and promoting artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas by highlighting significant, provoking and ground-breaking work.