Jafar Panahi

For the last 18 years, the UCLA Film & Television Archive's Celebration of Iranian Cinema has gone beyond the headlines of the troubled Middle Eastern country to reveal that, despite cultural differences, Iranians have the same hopes, desires and problems as we do. "While I think a lot of these films speak to larger human issues that we all deal with, they are still deeply rooted in a specific context," says Paul Malcolm, who programmed the 19th edition of the festival, which beings Saturday.

Widely hailed as one of the world's most exciting filmmakers during the 1990s, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has spent most of the last decade seeming purposefully on the margins, making documentaries and experimental films. With "Certified Copy," which opened in Los Angeles and New York on Friday and will be available on cable video on demand March 23, he returns to narrative feature filmmaking while staking out bold new territory. Shooting a feature outside Iran for the first time, Kiarostami has crafted an elusive look at art and love set amid the beauty of a small Tuscan town.

It was a great night for a guy named Joe, as Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," a film as wonderfully eccentric as it sounds, won the Palme d'Or at the 63rd Festival des Cannes. Thai director Weerasethakul, who tells people to call him Joe because of the difficulty Westerners have pronouncing his name, has made a one-of-a-kind dreamy ghost story about a man who is on speaking terms with all manner of supernatural beings. "This is like another world for me. This is surreal," the director said on accepting the prize at the Palais des Festivals on Sunday night.

Peyman Moadi, the star of Asghar Farhadi's Oscar-nominated Iranian domestic drama "A Separation," is finally at peace with himself and his career. Along the way, though, he gave up his youthful ideas of studying film in New York, heeded his parents' advice by getting a degree in a subject he didn't care for — engineering — and wrote five very commercial movies in Iran. "But I was suffering all the time because I didn't even like these movies," said Moadi, 41, during a recent visit to Los Angeles.

The UCLA Film Archive's "Travelers: New Iranian Cinema" opens tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall's James Bridges Theater with "The Circle," the third film from Jafar Panahi. The same filmmaker's 1995 "The White Balloon" and 1997 "The Mirror" were simple stories about young girls that illuminated the status of women in Iran. The bleakly powerful "The Circle," winner of the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, suggests that Iran is a prison for women.

Tamineh Milani, the Iranian director of "Two Women," who recently served seven days in prison on shadowy, unsubstantiated charges, says she still does not know the outcome of her controversial case. She believes she has become a pawn in the ongoing struggle between the liberalizing policies of President Mohammed Khatami and powerful right-wing fundamentalist forces.