A feature film shot covertly in Iran won a jury award for ensemble cast at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Between war and recent street protests, the filmmakers had many challenges getting The Friend’s House is Here finished in time for their premiere.

Set just after last summer’s Iran-Israel war, the film is a portrait of Tehran’s vibrant underground culture. Despite increasing government crackdowns, street concerts, art galleries, avant-garde theater performances, and after parties carry on. They are the spaces where artists celebrate, flirt, and discuss life and art.

The story — all in Persian — centers on two roommates and friends who are part of that scene. Like the actresses who portray them, one performs with an underground theater troupe, and the other makes social media videos of herself dancing in front of historical monuments — something that’s illegal under Iranian law.

When a woman in the street scolds Pari and Hana for not wearing their hijabs, they laugh. They and their creative friends refuse to be silenced by the regime, even as authorities begin to target them.

Hana Mana and Mahshad Bahram, in The Friend’s House is Here.

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“They just wanna just have a regular life, they wanna be on Instagram, they wanna dance. They wanna be free,” says filmmaker Maryam Ataei. “We wanted to tell the story of sisterhood and a fantastic community of people helping each other.”

Her co-director and husband, Hossein Keshavarz, who also co-wrote and co-produced the film says they were inspired by the young artists they know in Tehran. “We just fell in love with them. They’re so cool. They’re so funny. They’re so hip,” he says. “Resistance is an everyday act for them.”

Keshavarz says the same defiant generation has been challenging the Iranian government in massive street protests. But as NPR has reported, security forces have arrested and even killed thousands of people since the beginning of the year.

“Even if the government is violently cracking down, these young people don’t want to be told how to live,” he says. “Even though the government brutalizes them, they take their lumps. So many people we’ve worked with have been arrested for such arbitrary reasons, but they keep on and they’re there for each other.”

Keshavarz says Iranian authorities continue to clamp down on filmmakers critical of the regime, like Jafar Panahi, who is nominated for an Academy Award this year for his film It Was Just an Accident. In Iran, Panahi’s films are banned; he’s been repeatedly arrested and imprisoned in Iran for speaking out.

In December, Panahi was sentenced in absentia to another year in prison. And just this week, his co-screenwriter was arrested.

“Jafar Panahi actually said it was like psychological terrorism,” says Keshavarz. “Artists are being arrested so much for doing their work. That’s just kind of like the baseline of difficulty and fear that we had to deal with.”

The filmmakers met with NPR during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to talk about what it took to get their film there.

The filmmakers with actresses Hana Mana and Mahshad Bahram from The Friend’s House is Here.

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They say they shot The Friend’s House Is Here in secret, hiding their cameras and sound equipment. They could only shoot one or two takes in the streets to avoid getting noticed by authorities. They worried that spies could rat them out, and could only trust close friends and family to be extras.

They finished shooting the film in October and were still in post-production when massive street protests began. By January, the Iranian government responded by shutting down the country’s internet.

“We were so stressed out,” says Ataei. “We were not sure we would make it for Sundance.”

Ataei and Keshavarz were already in the U.S., but two of their crew members made the risky decision to smuggle the film out of the country to Turkey. They hid the footage on a hard drive.

“They put it at the end of a religious film in case their drive got seized,” says Keshavarz.

He says the crew members went through numerous checkpoints, and drove nonstop for 12 hours to get past the border into Turkey.

“Then finally we got a call: ‘I have the film! I’m going to upload the film right now,'” Ataei recalls. “What they did was so heroic!”

But the drama didn’t end.

During a protest in Iran last month, an actress from the film was injured. “She got shot in the face with pellet bullets. And she couldn’t go to the hospital because she would be arrested or possibly killed,” says Keshavarz. “So many people, nurses, doctors, helped her hopefully save her vision.”

Meanwhile, because of the U.S. travel ban, the film’s two main actresses were not allowed to go to the premiere.

“It’s so crazy, all these difficulties making a film in Iran and skirting the authorities,” says Keshavarz. “And then now the film’s at Sundance, but you can’t get a visa from the State Department.”

With their seven-year-old daughter, the filmmakers continue to split their time between the U.S. and Iran. Ataei, 45, says she spent her childhood surviving nearby explosions during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Keshavarz, 48, who grew up in New Jersey and New York met Ataei ten years ago through his sister. They quickly teamed up to make indie films together.

“Also we worked on a Hollywood movie for five years. We were consultants. But they cancelled the film,” says Ataei, who says that was heartbreaking.

But the filmmakers haven’t given up; they’re now in L.A. back pitching Hollywood their next projects, including an animated feature set in ancient Iran.

In the fall of 2021, four months before Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine, filmmaker Julia Loktev came to Moscow to make a documentary. The Kremlin had recently labeled more than 100 individuals and organizations as “foreign agents” — a phrase with deep roots in Soviet-era repression — and Loktev wanted to understand what this designation meant.

“It [is] quite disturbing when a society forces members … to mark themselves everywhere as suspect, not really belonging to the society,” Loktev says. “And we said, ‘OK, let’s try to make a film about this. Let’s see where this goes.'”

Loktev, an American citizen who was born in the Soviet Union, says the designation was being applied to reporters, bloggers and human rights groups who had spent decades documenting political persecution. Her documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, follows a group of young journalists working for TV Rain, Russia’s last independent television channel, as well as other independent journalists who had been deemed foreign agents.

Loktev says the nature of her film changed on Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. “In that first week of the full-scale war, all that independent journalism becomes impossible in Russia,” she says. “And all of these characters try to work to live another day, to just keep reporting the truth.”

Many of the subjects of the documentary wound up fleeing Russia. TV Rain is now operating out of the Netherlands, and Loktev says the Russian government has accused several of the station’s news anchors of being extremist terrorists. Loktev sees parallels between the subjects in her film and Sisyphus, the character in Greek mythology forced to constantly push a boulder up a hill.

“If there is a lesson, I think it’s the things that people say in the film like, ‘Let joy and laughter be part of our resistance,'” she says. “You know, finding meaning in pushing the stone and not giving up — even when things seem rather hopeless.”

Interview highlights

On shooting the film on her iPhone

I had initially had this idea that I would have a cinematographer, because … you’re supposed to shoot documentaries with a little bit of a crew. But then, as soon as I arrived, it was so clear that the best thing that I had was my access to people, and also kind of how comfortable people seemed to feel with me. I speak native Russian, but I also … it’s just one body in the room and people really opened up to me. And also, people are used to being filmed with a phone. Like, the presence of phones is not a big deal. I did eventually [get] a little lens on my phone, and a little microphone, but it was just really me with the phone. And I think that so affects how people behave, because there’s an intimacy to the film and that’s what you see.

On following independent journalists when Russia invaded Ukraine

I was there filming during the first week of that full-scale war, and every day they were trying to figure out, “How do we get to report tomorrow?” And there were all these restrictions being put on them, like the Russian communications authority said they had to only report what is confirmed by the Ministry of Defense. And they would find all these ways around it. Like, they would be showing an apartment building bombed in Ukraine. And then after they would say, “We are obligated to say that the Russian Ministry of Defense says it is only bombing military targets,” when clearly we have just been shown that they are bombing an apartment building, not a military target.

They came out with a statement against the war. All of them were extremely against this and horrified, but they kept getting more and more threats. Eventually all these media would get shut down and they were facing this choice of literally, “Do we go to work tomorrow or do we go to the airport?” And they decided to go to the airport because the logic went, if they keep working, they really risked being thrown in jail. And if you’re in jail, you’re not much use to anyone as a journalist. … So they made the choice to leave so they could keep reporting.

On whether she feared for her own safety while filming

I thought about my own safety more when I first started coming to Russia. And then, during that first week of the full-scale invasion, I became monomaniacal. The only thing I could think of was my footage and getting it out and making sure I was capturing things and making [sure] I was filming.

Brittney Griner had just gotten arrested. But I was like, “Well, I’m not a famous basketball player.” It’s that thing you do where you logically try to explain to yourself why you’ll be OK. … I was staying in this hotel that was literally surrounded. Like every time I walked out, I had to walk past this wall of riot police and helmets. So I would just kind of keep my head down and go to wherever I needed to go to film.

On the parallels she sees between Russia’s crackdown on journalists and the current political climate in the U.S.

There’s Easter eggs in the film that become more and more relevant every day, whether it’s arrests of journalists, obviously, … [or] the end of comedy shows. Or there’s a moment where Russia’s largest, oldest NGO Memorial, which is a human rights organization that was dedicated to preserving the memory and researching cases of political repression going back to Stalinist times, but also now, and they’re shut down by the courts, and the judge uses the explanation of: Why should we, the victors in World War II, have to be ashamed of our history? And so then I hear Trump talking about the Smithsonian and saying: Why can’t we talk about only the pleasant things in our history? Why do we have to talk about things like slavery? … Every day it feels like something in the film starts to resonate in a different way here for the U.S.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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These Winter Olympics will feature a new sport for the first time in over three decades.

While the Games regularly add events within existing disciplines, they haven’t introduced an entirely new sport since the return of skeleton in 2002.

That changes this year with the debut of ski mountaineering, aka “skimo.”

The sport, which involves hiking up and skiing down a mountain, will feature three events: women’s sprint, men’s sprint and mixed relay.

That’s in addition to five brand new competitions in longtime Winter Olympic sports — for a grand total of eight new medal opportunities at this year’s Games. Here’s what to know about them.

The new sport: ski mountaineering

In ski mountaineering, athletes navigate a set course amidst rugged terrain. They attach climbing skins to the base of their skis while they ascend a mountain, quickly maneuver their skis off to tackle a series of steps on foot, then readjust and ski back down.

The sprint race consists of an ascent and descent, starting with time trials and seeding athletes into groups of six. In the mixed relay, teams of one man and one woman alternate four laps — two ascents and two descents — on a longer course (with an elevation gain of 460 feet compared to 230 in the sprint).

According to Team USA, ski mountaineering has its roots in the “need to traverse the snow-covered landscapes of Europe in prehistoric times,” and can officially be traced back to the mountains of Switzerland in 1897.

But the sport known as skimo really took off in the 21st century, hosting its first world championships in France in 2002 and establishing a World Cup circuit two years later.

It was added to the Winter Youth Olympic Games in 2020, and the following year was approved for inclusion in Milano Cortina — a fitting country for its Olympic debut, since the sport has a long history and many international champions in Italy.

Ski mountaineering competitions will be held in the Valtellina Valley town of Bormio, at the same venue as Alpine skiing.

The U.S. team narrowly qualified for the Games in a high-stakes Utah race in early December, the very last chance for teams to earn Olympic ranking points.

The mixed relay team of Anna Gibson and Cam Smith won its race by a minute and a half on home snow, beating rival Canada to take home a gold medal and secure for Team USA the continent’s last Olympics spot. It wasn’t just a major victory, but a chance for Team USA to educate curious Instagram followers about the sport itself.  

New events within skeleton, luge, ski jumping and moguls

The other new events are additional variations of existing competitions, giving more athletes — particularly women — a chance to compete:

There’s dual moguls, a freestyle skiing event in which two athletes compete side by side, performing aerial tricks on two jumps of a bumpy course. Traditional moguls, featuring one skier at a time, have been part of the Winter Games since the 1990s. This year will feature both men’s and women’s dual moguls.

Another new event is mixed team skeleton, which pairs one man and one woman from the same country to race down an ice track head-first on a small sled.

This year also marks the debut of women’s doubles luge, in which two women from the same country double up on the same sled to race down the track, feet-first. The existing doubles luge competition will officially become a men’s event, which it effectively has been since the 1960s, since women were technically eligible but never previously participated.

Ski jumping is also getting a brand new event, the women’s individual large hill competition. That means both men and women will compete in normal and large hill events, as well as a mixed team event, which made its debut in the 2022 Beijing Games.

Men have one additional ski jumping medal event, which is rebranding this year: the super team, a new format that replaces the traditional four-person team competition with pairs of two competing in up to three jumps. Olympics organizers say the restructuring makes the competition more dynamic and paves the way for smaller nations to participate.

Sky’s coverage of the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has won best news programme at the Broadcast Awards.

The hour-long special, fronted by lead world news presenter Yalda Hakim, aired in December 2024 following the sudden ousting of the dictator.

Featuring on-the-ground reporting and interviews from chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay and international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn, as well as analysis from Alistair Bunkall, Alex Rossi, and Ivor Bennett, the programme covered the aftermath of Assad’s toppling across prisons, hospital morgues, and his ransacked villa.

It was praised by judges for its outstanding storytelling and “commitment to painting a global picture”, including Assad’s role as a key ally of Vladimir Putin.

One judge praised the “strong, knowledgeable journalists who provided nuanced insights” throughout, while another commended its “excellent editorial clarity and insightful, even-handed journalistic analysis”.

Judges also cited how widely it was shared across social media, as well as praise from human rights organisations, Syrian refuges in the UK, and industry peers.

You can watch the programme in full at the top of this page.

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It’s the Winter Olympics, that special season every four years in which everyone you know is suddenly an expert on luge strategy and curling technique from the comfort of their couch.

There’s plenty to dive into this year, at the unusually spread-out Milan Cortina Olympics.

Hundreds of athletes from around the world — including 232 from the U.S. — will descend on over two dozen venues across northern Italy to compete in 16 different sports. There are 116 medal events on the line throughout the 2 1/2 weeks. And this time, unlike the COVID-era 2022 Beijing Winter Games, spectators will be allowed to watch in person.

But you don’t have to board a plane or sport hand warmers to get a good view, thanks to NBC’s robust broadcasting rights and NPR’s scrappy team of journalists on the ground. Here’s how to follow the action — and peek behind the curtain — from home.

How to watch the opening ceremony

The Feb. 6 opening ceremony marks the official start of the Games (even though several sports, including curling and ice hockey, start competing two days earlier).

It will be held primarily at the historic San Siro Stadium in Milan, featuring performances by icons like Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli, as well as traditional elements like the Parade of Nations and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron.

But there will also be simultaneous ceremonies and athlete parades at some of the other venues — scattered hundreds of miles apart — and, for the first time in history, a second Olympic cauldron will be lit in the co-host city of Cortina d’Ampezzo.

NBC’s live coverage of the opening ceremony (also streaming on Peacock) will begin at 2 p.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 6, with a prime-time broadcast planned for 8 p.m. ET the same day.

How to keep up once the Games begin

There are 16 days of competition between the opening and closing ceremonies, with contests and medal events scattered throughout, depending on the sport. Here’s the full schedule (events are listed in local time in Italy, which is six hours ahead of Eastern time).

NBC says it will broadcast events live throughout the day, with a nightly prime-time highlights show at 8 p.m. ET, followed by a late-night version.

U.S.-based viewers can watch on NBC, Peacock and a host of other platforms, including the apps and websites of both NBC and NBC Sports. Seasoned Olympic viewers will recognize Peacock viewing experiences like “Gold Zone” (which whips around between key moments, eliminating the need to channel surf) and “Multiview,” now available on mobile.

The Feb. 22 closing ceremony will be broadcast live starting at 2:30 p.m. ET, and again on prime time at 9 p.m. ET.

It will take place at a historic amphitheater in Verona, which will also host the opening ceremony of the Paralympics on March 6. Some 600 Para athletes will compete in 79 medal events across six sports — including Para Alpine skiing, sled hockey and wheelchair curling — before the closing ceremony in Cortina on March 15.

How to follow NPR’s coverage

All the while, you can check out NPR’s Olympics coverage to better understand the key people, context and moments that make up the Games.

NPR’s five-person Olympics team will bring you news, recaps and color from the ground in Italy, online, on air and in your inbox. Plus, expect updates and the occasional deep dive from NPR’s journalists watching from D.C. and around the world.

You can find all of NPR’s Winter Olympics stories (past, present and upcoming) here on our website.

To listen to our broadcast coverage, tune to your local NPR station and stream our radio programming on npr.org or the NPR app.

Plus, subscribe to our newsletter, Rachel Goes to the Games, for a daily dose of what it’s like to be there in person.

We’ll also have a video podcast, Up First Winter Games, to further dissect the day’s biggest Olympic stories and oddities. You can find it on NPR’s YouTube page.