Iranian American actor Anthony Azizi says the continuing Middle East conflict has sparked rising persecution of Iran’s Baha’i minority, including its members being jailed and tortured under the threat of execution.
“This a war on human rights and humanity and people who have no rights,” Azizi, a veteran series regular on U.S. dramas like CSI, Tehran and Gaumont TV’s The Deal, tells The Hollywood Reporter. He stars inCast Aside the Clouds, an Iran-set romance thriller about a young Baháʼí woman, played by Parmiss Sehat, who navigates her faith and systemic persecution.
The indie from director Mary Darling and co-directors Bre Vader and Felicia Sobhani will have a U.S. premiere on May 18 at SVA Theatre in New York City, followed by a Los Angeles premiere from June 4 at Lumiere Music Hall. There’s additional theatrical dates set in Chicago and northern Virginia in June.
Shot in Athens doubling as Tehran, Cast Aside the Clouds has Azizi playing Farhad Khosravi, a bookstore owner whose daughter Layla (Sehat) attends a secret university aligned with the Iranian Bahá’í spiritualist faith.
After the bookstore is attacked, a hospitalized Layla meets a young Muslim neurologist, Dr. Sasan Naderi, played by Behtash Fazlali, and they fall for one another. The romantic relationship between a Muslim and a member of the Bahá’í faith is tested when Layla learns Sasan has plans to go to Germany and she is arrested, imprisoned and tortured for being a Baha’i.
A drama about persecution in Iran resonates with Azizi, who was born in Tehran and into a Baha’i family where relatives lost jobs, were jailed, had property confiscated and two defiant uncles were executed after refusing to disavow their Baha’i faith.
“Both of my uncles rejected that notion and said there’s no way we will ever renounce what we believe is the elixir for all of mankind’s problems. You’re asking us to renounce what we believe is the answer. So they did not renounce their faith in Bahá’u’lláhand were murdered. Simply murdered,” Azizi recalled of his family members defying their interrogator and sticking to their belief in the Iranian founder of the Baha’i faith.
The Iranian American actor argues the long-standing persecution of the Baha’is in Iran has only escalated with the current Middle East tensions. “To murder people on the basis of their religious belief, it’s unreal to me that this is happening in 2026,” Azizi added.
Director Darling, while pointing to persecution of the Baha’is in Iran going back to the 1800s, echoed how the current Middle East crisis had escalated that threat to the religious minority. “Because of the ongoing war in Iran, the Baha’is are being scapegoated as spies for Israel, spies for America,” she warned.
Darling pointed to recent high profile imprisonments of Baha’i cousins Peyvand Naimi and Borna Naimi, who have undergone torture to force confessions and face possible death sentences. “It’s really horrible. They blindfold them, they beat them, they stand them on a chair and threaten to hang them, execution style, to force confessions for being spies. And they think they’re going to die,” the director insisted.
Hollywood actors Penn Badgley, Mark Ruffalo and Rainn Wilson have released an Instagram video calling for the release of the Naimi cousins from the infamous Kerman Prison.
Other recent imprisonments of Baha’i women include Faranak Zabihi being held in Tir Kola Prison after an April 8 arrest, and Neda Badakhsh, 63, who received a 10-year prison sentence in the Dowlatabad Prison in Isfahan.
Darling, who co-wrote her romantic thriller along with fellow Baha’i and husband Clark Donnelly,added the title for her Cast Aside the Clouds film came from a poem by Iranian writer Tahireh about replacing ignorance with world unity, a key tenet of the Baha’i faith. “She talks about casting away these clouds, these veils of ignorance that get between us and the reality around us, that we are actually one human family,” the director argued.
Darling added her Persian and English language drama also hopes to open up a wider discussion about religious persecution worldwide — from Uyghurs in China and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar to Christians and Yazidis in the Middle East. To that end, she’s looking to the upcoming U.S. theatrical runs leading to a wider distribution of Cast Aside the Clouds after ongoing discussions.
“We see this as a very, very important story and we know there are distributors out there who would be interested in being on the right side of history on this,” she added.