We Were Almost Happy

We Were Almost Happy is a collection of interconnected stories that follows the life of a boy from childhood to early adulthood in Iran before and after the 1979 Revolution. The book offers an unflinching account of poverty, love, friendship, family, fear, repression, personal aspirations, emotional and physical needs, and the search for identity within a traditional and deeply contradictory society. With honesty and, at times, painful candor, the author explores aspects of his own life that he was never able to express in his films. The characters and events in this book are real, and many of the stories are drawn directly from lived experience and personal memory. Yet We Were Almost Happy is more than the story of one individual. It is a portrait of a generation of Iranians who came of age between tradition and modernity, freedom and restriction, dreams and reality-and who carried the wounds and memories of those years with them for the rest of their lives. Mohammad-Ali Talebi is an Iranian screenwriter and film director whose career has spanned more than four decades. His films have been screened at major international film festivals, including Berlin, Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago, Locarno, Sundance, Tokyo, and many others, earning numerous awards and distinctions. Much of his work has been devoted to portraying the lives of ordinary people, children, young adults, family relationships, and the social realities of contemporary Iran. We Were Almost Happy is his first collection of short stories. In this book, Talebi ventures beyond the medium of cinema for the first time, turning to his own personal experiences and long-unspoken memories-stories that remained hidden for years behind silence, social conventions, and cultural constraints.