Best in the West

Best in the West is the story of a group of male friends who leave the country of their birth to seek education, opportunity, and adventure abroad. In relating the events of their emigration from Iran to the San Francisco Bay Area, the film explores the personal choices and relationships of these young men as they establish their lives and maintain a community in a new land. What began as an oral history of one family’s emigration to the West, soon expanded into a document of a transitional period in history that altered the landscape of international geopolitics and the lives of these men.

The filmmaker’s father, uncle, and many of their friends left Iran throughout the mid-1960s and the early 1970s and eventually arrived in San Francisco, where they engaged the counterculture with curiosity, charm, and charisma. The film locates their experiences within a geographically specific and historical context, which considers the Vietnam War, changes occurring in Iran, and the social, political, and musical atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s. The parallel history of the Iranian oil industry and its relationship to American oil companies and the growth in American consumption provides a surprising and poignant counterpoint.