The Cinema Museum of Iran is one of the country’s foremost cultural institutions, dedicated to preserving, researching, and showcasing the history and heritage of Iranian cinema. Created in the late 1990s and officially established as a museum in 2000, it has been housed since 2002 in Bagh Ferdows, a historic Qajar-era Garden complex in northern Tehran. The museum occupies a beautifully restored 19th-century mansion surrounded by a traditional Persian garden, offering visitors a calm and atmospheric setting in which to discover more than a century of Iranian film history.

Across several thematic galleries, the museum presents the evolution of cinema in Iran from the earliest screenings to contemporary art cinema, displaying a rich collection of vintage cameras and projectors, film posters, screenplays, production documents, costumes, photographs, and personal memorabilia from renowned filmmakers, actors, and craftspeople. Its archive holds tens of thousands of photographs, thousands of film magazines, documents, posters and scripts, making it a key reference point for researchers and students of Iranian cinema.

Beyond its permanent and temporary exhibitions, the Cinema Museum of Iran functions as an active cultural hub. The complex includes several screening halls that host classic and contemporary film programs, retrospectives, and educational events, as well as a bookshop and cultural shop, cafés, and spaces for talks and workshops. In this way, the museum not only safeguards cinematic memory, but also fosters an ongoing dialogue between filmmakers, scholars and audiences, connecting different generations around the shared experience of Iranian cinema.