Much of the scholarly attention to the post-1979 Revolution cinema in Iran disregards pro-regime filmic practices, with Iran-Iraq War films as a nationalist exception, in favor of the oppositional art-house cinema. ‘Ammār “popular” film festival, run by the Research Institute of Islamic Revolution Cultural Front, was born in response to the 2009 Green Movement inside Iran as well as the Islamic Republic’s increased presence in Southwest Asia under its anti-imperialism banner. Through the past fourteen years, ‘Ammār festival has exhibited hundreds of cinematic works, mostly short documentaries, made by pro-regime media producers who find the art-house cinema as “West-pleasing,” the national cinema industry “Westoxificated,” and the state-run television too timid for their revolutionary fervor. ‘Ammār’s distinguishing feature lies in its down-to-earth screenings in mosques, schools, military bases, and the houses of “Holy Shrine Defenders” in the provinces that are followed by political discussions amongst the poor. In recent years, a selection of the festival’s works, emphasizing “Axis-of-Resistance,” has also been screened in several Central and Southwest Asian countries at the Islamic Republic’s cultural embassies, particularly Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. While ‘Ammār has been ignored by film critics in Iran due to its formal amateurism and overtly political message, the organizers themselves have published several books and articles in Farsi that theorize and historicize the festival. These texts nationally graft ‘Ammar’s production and exhibition to soldier-filmmakers and free-of-charge screenings for the soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88) and in opposition to the bourgeois national cinema. Transnationally, these sources associate ‘Ammar’s militancy with that of the anti-imperial Third Cinema movement in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s and against the secular humanism and formalism of Iranian art-house cinema, aesthetically and politically well-received in Western film festivals. Reading this archive against its grain and through the scholarship on colonial cinema and film festivals, this paper argues that ‘Ammar film festival, alongside its anti-U.S. imperialism, functions as Islamic Republic’s own apparatus where the festival’s down-to-earth modus operandi materially translates into the enactment of temporary colonial spaces outside Iran and the maintenance of Persian-Shia nationalism inside Iran. By attending to such cultural practices, this study first hopes to contribute to the growing scholarship that interrogates the Islamic Republic of Iran’s imperial project in the region, and second to the field of film studies by injecting the colonial cinema’s statecraft, assumed as past, into the contemporaneity of global film festivals.