Bleecker Street and Greenwich Entertainment are bringing The Friend's House Is Here to American theatres on December 4, months after it won a Sundance jury prize for its ensemble.
The trailer dropped Monday night, and it's blunt about the stakes. "Everyday, everything is up in the air," one of the leads says, and that line pretty much sums up what this film is about.
The Friend's House Is Here follows Pari, a theatre director, and Hanna, a dancer, who share an apartment and an underground creative circle in Tehran. They're best friends and professional partners building something close to freedom inside a city that doesn't allow much of it. Then their circle gets found out, and the back half of the film is about what they're willing to risk to protect each other.
It won the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast at Sundance 2026 earlier this year, a detail that matters more than it might look like on paper. The film is a US production but was shot entirely inside Iran, which is why it competed in the US Dramatic section rather than the international one. FirstShowing.net, which carried the trailer first, called it a "sophisticated and heroic celebration" and pitched its directors as heirs to Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami, the two names most associated with Iranian cinema's long tradition of smuggling political statement through intimate, small-scale storytelling.
Directors Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz are making their first feature together here, though both have separate credits, including Dog Sweat and Eugenia and John. Their pitch for this one is that the line between performance and real life keeps dissolving. Rehearsals blur into actual rituals of daily survival. The smallest creative decision, the trailer suggests, carries real risk when the state is watching.
The cast includes Mahshad Bahram, Hana Mana, Farzad Karen and Zohreh Pirnia, names that will be new to most audiences outside the festival circuit. Greenwich Entertainment has set a December 4 theatrical release in the US, timed, deliberately or not, to land right in the middle of awards season chatter, when voters and critics are paying closer attention to smaller, specialty titles.
What's notable is how FirstShowing's coverage frames this as filmed "far removed from familiar portrayals of Iran" seen in Western media, less about repression as spectacle and more about the daily negotiations of making art under constant surveillance. Whether that distinction lands with a wider US audience, used to louder dramas about the region, is the real test once reviews start coming in next month.
For now it's a trailer and a date. Sundance already gave its verdict. December will tell us if American theatres agree, and whether a film built almost entirely on quiet tension can find an audience outside the festival bubble that first embraced it.
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