The Latest Breaking News from Ali Abbasi

On April 8, 2002, Saeed Hanaei was executed for the murders of 16 women between 2000 and 2001 in the Iranian city of Mashhad. The media dubbed him the “Spider Killer” for the way he lured his victims into his lair — the same apartment he shared with his unsuspecting…

"To show the underbelly of a violent place, you can't do it with a feather pen," the filmmaker tells Salon

Death on wheels.

Ninety-nine lashes and a prison sentence awaited Zar Amir Ebrahimi in 2008 when she decided to flee Iran

Holy Spider wants to tell a bigger story but gets too bogged down in the trappings of the serial killer genre

Paris (AFP) - Iran's next revolution will be brought on by women taking back the freedoms denied to them in the Islamic republic, said Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the winner of this year's Best Actress award at Cannes.

Ebrahimi won for Holy Spider in which she plays a journalist trying to solve serial murders of prostitutes in Mashhad.

Cannes (France) (AFP) - Iranian Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who lives in exile following a smear campaign about her love life, wept with joy as she won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. 

In Cairo, a religious student at the prestigious Al-Azhar Islamic University is recruited by secret police to infiltrate a Muslim Brotherhood cell. In Mashad, a holy city in Iran, a serial killer prowls a seedy suburb and strangles head-scarfed prostitutes. In the first film, bloodlust officials torture dissidents with abandon.…

Cannes (France) (AFP) - An Iranian director, who unsettled Cannes with a film about a serial killer "cleansing" the holy city of Mashhad of prostitutes, on Monday criticised the way women are represented in Iranian films.

Twenty years after a serial killer murdered 16 sex workers in Mashad, Ali Abbasi has made a fictionalised account of his capture and trial