Iranian Yellow Pages is a moving and slightly bonkers short documentary focusing on Iranian born, London-based delivery driver Reza as he builds his food business by placing an ad in an eccentric Farsi language newspaper.

Here, Molly Lipson speaks to the film’s director and co-producer Anna Snowball about her Netflix how she came across the Iranian Yellow Pages, why Reza’s story became the main focus of the film and how he and his family have reacted to its release.

17 August 2025

In many Iranian-owned shops, exchange offices, and restaurants around London, you’re likely to find stacks of colourful, vibrant Iranian newspapers Tucked within their pages are intriguing free ads – the Iranian Yellow Pages – and while the film mainly follows Reza, it also weaves in the strange but riveting stories of other people behind these adverts. There are the OAPs partying at a lunch club, a lady washing cars, a puppeteer doing shows in the library, and many lonely hearts. They all want the same thing – to find connections in the lonely city they now call home and reconnection to the complicated country they've left behind.

Charted over three years, the film follows Reza’s emotional journey from struggle to success. The observational footage of Reza is accompanied by brilliant, stylised animation by Francesca Cattaneo that fully draws us into the world of these papers and elevates the short doc format.

Funded by the Netflix Documentary Talent Fund, the film has been screened at festivals including the BFI London Film Festival, Norwich Film Festival and Big Sky Documentary Festival, and was nominated for the London Critics Circle Best British/Irish Short Film and the Best Documentary Short at the Grierson Awards.

ML: How did you come across this story? 

AS: My husband [the film’s producer and editor Albolfazl Talooni] and I were eating in an Iranian restaurant in West London and came across this newspaper. There are actually about three or four different ones and they all have these yellow pages. We thought it was just amazing, especially these free ads. Albolfazl started reading a few out to me and they were so random and seemed to span the whole of human existence, But more meaningfully, it felt like it was telling the stories of people who had moved to a new place and were trying to put roots down, while also trying to connect to the past and where they come from. We just kept calling people up from the adverts and met so many characters, but Reza’s ad caught my eye specifically as it had all these emojis and he said he’d do his first ten deliveries for free. It had a sense of desperation to it that made me want to talk to him. We called him up, and he just talked and talked and talked. And then we went to meet him and started filming with him pretty much straight away.

ML: How did you begin the filming process with Reza?

AS: I was very upfront when we spoke on the phone about the fact we were making a film, and then we met without a camera the first time and discussed if he’d be happy to film a little bit and explore what that was like.

ML: How did you develop the visual elements of the film?   

AS: The newspapers feel quite homemade, like they were made in Microsoft Paint or something similar. They have a very human feel and the adverts are quite humorous. If you flick through, there are a lot of weird Photoshopped images of, for example, a duck made from banana skin, so the visual language of the film had to mirror that.

ML: Did you have any reservations about taking a slightly untraditional approach?

AS: The thing is, I’ve made so many films and taught on documentary courses, and I'm so honestly just a bit bored of standard interview mixed with B-roll. I still love observational footage and embedding myself in people’s lives, but when I sit with the hard drives, I watch it all back and think, ok, but what next? How do I elevate this story for the cinema? I’m not saying I’m a maverick – lots of people are doing interesting things in documentary which I’m really drawn to.

ML: The graphics and animation definitely elevate the story – how did you decide to work with Francesca Cattaneo and what was your process like?

AS: I had worked with Francesca before on a project withy refugee women and she was just great. She came to all these meetings she didn’t even need to be at, and was so collaborative and patient. I wanted to work with her on this project as well and give her a bit more creativity than on the last project. I would go through all the newspapers and just take a picture of anything I found funny and set up a Google drive for all these images, plus a shared Pinterest and we were always coming to the same ideas, but separately.

ML: What was the rest of the team like?

AS: I assembled a really nice team of amazing people who all really brought themselves and their creativity to the project, even though I wasn't paying them that much. The note I gave everyone was, we're going maximalist, nothing is too much. We can always pare things back, but come with your wildest interpretation of what this film could be. Our DOP ended up running down Finchley Road with his camera pretending to be a motorbike – it was mad but, why not. The film is what it is because everyone came with their weirdest ideas.

ML: Do you have any sense of what Reza thinks about the film?

AS: Netflix held a premiere for the film and Reza came along with his family. I had offered him the chance to watch the film before that screening but he wanted to watch it there with an audience. The family had spoken for ages about doing a day out, but they work so much they’d never had the chance, so they made a real day of it, going around central London in the day then coming to the premiere in the evening. During the screening, I was sat next to his son, with Reza and then his wife alongside him. His son just laughed throughout the entire screening. There was a lady behind us sobbing, and he was just laughing. So it was pretty hard to concentrate but it seemed like everyone there really enjoyed the film. Actually it was also funny because after watching Reza said to me, well I don’t know, it didn’t really show the whole story – which he’s right about of course, it’s a twelve minute short! In particular I think he would have liked it to show a bit more about his eventual success. But as the night went on and more people came up to him being really nice, his reaction started to change as well. By the end of the night he was saying how much he loved it.  

ML: Love that! It’s interesting that you decided to focus more on the struggle than the ‘success’ side of things, why was that?

AS: I think the newspaper is a snippet of people within a certain stage of their immigration journey where they’re torn between two places. They’re having their roots ripped out of one place and trying to put them down elsewhere. There’s joy in that too, but a lot of it is struggle. I feel like by the time people are more settled, that isn’t reflecting the story of the newspaper itself, which is what this film was centred on.   

ML: Do you know how his shop is doing now?

AS: I think pretty good! My husband went past it on the weekend and said it was absolutely slammed.

ML: Finally, what are you working on next?

AS: I’m currently working on a branded project, and also my first feature doc about late-diagnosed neurodiversity in women via the story of my friend.