KILLING MAD DOGS Persian Film Screening at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Bahram Beyzaie | 2001 | Iran | 2h15m | Presented in the original Persian audio with English subtitles

KILLING MAD DOGS shows recently-passed Persian filmmaker Bahram Beyzaie doing something I find especially exciting: taking his intelligence, his moral seriousness and his command of social tension and pushing them into the shape of a thriller. The film follows Golrokh Kamali, a writer who returns to Tehran and gets pulled into a web of debt, betrayal and manipulation surrounding her missing husband. What starts as a desperate attempt to sort out a financial mess turns into something much darker about corruption, power and the price women are forced to pay inside a society built to exploit their vulnerability.

What I like so much about KILLING MAD DOGS is that it never feels like a generic crime story. Critics and scholars regularly place it within Beyzaie’s broader critique of modern Iranian urban life, and that feels right to me. The city in this film is a maze of deceit and shifting power, and Golrokh has to keep moving through it with very little protection. Beyzaie himself described the film as being about a society that talks about morality while being deeply materialistic, and that tension runs through the whole work. It’s one reason the film was both a box office success in Iran and a major late-career statement from one of the country’s most important filmmakers.

WHY I’VE INCLUDED IT IN THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM: I really wanted to show it during my Persian Film Fest last February, before deciding I wanted to show it in the same week as CHESS OF THE WIND. Where CHESS OF THE WIND is cold, gothic and aristocratic, KILLING MAD DOGS is modern, urban and tense. It belongs here because it turns social critique into gripping cinema without losing complexity, and because Golrokh is such a strong central figure.

Beyzaie has long been noted for writing formidable women, and this film gives us one of his most memorable examples. For me, that mix of suspense, intelligence and moral anger makes it an essential inclusion.

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to the first floor. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/