Scholars have largely theorized Iranian cinema according to spatially-fixed national and exilic cinema frameworks, and ideas of modernity conceived in American and European contexts. The first Persian talkie films such as The Lor Girl (1933) and Layli and Majnun (1937) have been entry points to discussions of modernity and Iranian cinema in the context of a nascent, territorial-nationalism in Iran. Yet all of the first Persian talkies were made in India in collaboration between Abdolhossein Sepanta, an Iranian expat living in Bombay, and Ardeshir Irani, a Parsi-community member and owner of the Bombay Imperial Film Company, and were exported to Iran after they were met with enthusiasm among the Parsi community in India. This paper interrogates the borders of the national cinema paradigm and inquires into the significance of the fact that the Persian talkies were made and successful in India. I argue that the arrival of the first Persian talkies signaled a point of rupture in the trajectory of Iranian cinema as it ended local silent film production and set the stage for cinematic exchange between Iran and India. These sound-films, which encompassed the dynamics of both Persian language and Indo-Persian cultural traditions, and introduced melodramatic and affective elements through music, fostered a transnational cine-community between Iran and India. Drawing on Bhaskar Sarkar’s translocal approach to cinema in a globalized age which conceptualizes transcultural exchange as occurring at the level of the “translocal-popular,” I examine travelogues, newspapers and compare the content of the first Persian talkie films with silent films made in Tehran such as Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (1933) in order to demonstrate how the talkie films engaged a complex network of shared experiences, fantasies, and histories among Parsi and Tehrani audiences. Even though Iran did not develop a full-fledged film industry capable of producing sound films until a decade later the first Persian talkies influenced the first domestically produced commercial sound films, and fostered a transnational cine-community whose continued existence is demonstrated in the consistent popularity of Bollywood film in Iran. In examining the first Persian talkies, this presentation adds spatial and temporal dimensions to understandings of Iranian local and global imaginations at this historical moment. In addition, in focusing on sound, it contributes to largely visual-centric scholarship on Iranian cinema, and it destabilizes the authority of American and European experiences of the coming of sound to cinema which have been theorized as universal models.