The Shah’s Party

Colourfully narrates a bizarre three-day extravaganza thrown by Iran’s phoney dynasty, which cost $700 million and helped to precipitate the Shah’s downfall.

The Shah’s Party captures Iran’s oil-rich boom years, before the Islamic Revolution. In 1971, eight years before the imperial dynasty fell, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his glamorous wife, Farah Diba, hosted one of the largest ever gatherings of world leaders, celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy. But this stranger-than-fiction event, staged in a tented city by the ancient ruins of Persepolis, triggered a rise in leftist agitation and a turn towards Islam.

Ruhollah Khomeini, then an obscure mullah living in Parisian exile, began a relentless campaign against the imperial family. A skilled populist, Khomeini tapped into growing inequalities and resentments to push his theocratic vision, particularly among those who had left the countryside in search of work. The Shah’s autocratic style played poorly in a world increasingly concerned with human rights. The Persepolis party became a symbol of Iran’s regime—not only brutally repressive, but out of touch with ordinary people’s struggles.

This is a tale of extravagance, hubris and tragedy; of a king desperate to drag his country into the modern world, yet trapped in nostalgic dreams of personal glory; and of how Iranian society’s trickle of dissent built, within a decade, into a revolutionary torrent.