“The film stopped and someone said the cinema was on fire.” In 1979, Islamists set fire to the cinema Rex in Abadan, heralding it as a turning point in the Islamic revolution and the end of Iranian post-war cinema. 422 people died. “Filmfarsi” is a term for the popular Iranian low-budget films, which came to an end with this event. They are hybrids of recycled and re-coded genre cinema, neither fully film, nor fully farsi. In his archaeology of VHS bootlegs, Eshan Khoshbakht embarks on a search for the collective subconscious of a “nation with a split personality” and digs up sediments of machismo and homoeroticism, “madonnas” and “whores”, class conflicts, love, sex and violence.