“Our generation is a martyred generation” claimed Masud Kimiai, a renowned Iranian film director, in an interview in 1978; “Very soon, those which we knew, recognised and had aged with, were swept away and were instead replaced by dance, car brands and jeans…we were the ones most affected by moving from [houses with large] courtyards to apartment buildings.”# Through an analysis of primary sources form pre-revolutionary Iran, this paper will contend that the Iranian cinema of the 70s—and the cultural productions and exchanges that it entailed—facilitated a cinematic cosmopolitanism that was dialogic both in its content, and in its relation to its “others.” In its relation to modernity, cinema brought tangible changes to everyday experiences and prompted alternative social practices. Ever since its public screenings in 1903, the development of cinema was tied to urban development, and the expansion of cities were in turn linked to the emergence of new public spaces such as cinemas. Movie theatres were built in urban areas that were easily accessible by mechanical forms of transportation such as tramways and streetcars, and concentrated in the most prestigious urban streets. While mediating public sentiments associated with urban development—both in content and structure—cinema itself thus became engaged in a process of urban cosmopolitanism. This paper implements a historiographical view to explore the cinematic developments of pre-revolutionary Iran in facilitating the emergence of multiple publics through competing representations of Iranian modernity. Focusing on the Tehran International Film Festival (1972-1977), this study suggests that the cinema of the time, being informed of the international cinema, facilitated the crafting of a vernacular cosmopolitanism that was manifest in the festival as well as the films of the period. In other words, annexing of the global into the local context of Iran, the festival functioned to stage Tehran as a vernacular urban space on a global level. The Tehran Festival was especially organised in such a way that would engage large numbers of people from the various areas of Tehran in the shaping of an inclusionary and diversified cosmopolitan cinematic culture in the capital city. The films showcased at Tehran International Film Festival, too, worked to shape the popular imagination within the context of a globally embedded everyday life; so that the festival functioned as the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds—a plural space in which the self could be re-imagined and re-staged on a global level.