Screened for the first time outside of Iran since the 1979 Revolution, a selection of Iranian director Samuel Khachikian’s most notable thrillers were available for an international audience at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. Previously only accessible to Persian-speaking viewers, Khachikian’s films, which invented the genre of thriller in Iranian cinema, are entering new international platforms, thereby writing an alternative history for these films extending beyond the Revolution. The choices of the curators to select Khachikian’s thrillers, and to highlight the films’ corresponding female-centric narratives, parallel a scholarly movement to integrate Iranian popular films within the broader history of Iranian cinema. This paper argues that the specific curation of Khachikian’s films and their relevance to viewers in non-Iranian viewing spheres frame these earliest thrillers as representative of all Iranian thrillers. Their presentation in these international contexts constructs a history of mid-century Iranian popular cinema that appears feminist. As a result, this redefined Iranian thriller genre within the contemporary period contradicts assertions of cinema scholars that 1950s-1970s popular cinema was a misogynist, spectacle-oriented undertaking. As interest in presenting mid-century Iranian popular cinema has grown amongst artists and cinema historians, the curators for the Cinema Ritrovato festival initiated a critical conversation on the ways in which changes in places of viewing can shift the meaning of a film genre. The re-packaging of Iranian thrillers as feminist productions outside of their Iranian, mid-twentieth-century context politicizes the memory of these films as they were originally viewed in Iran - in concert with other Iranian popular films. Engaging feminist film scholar Miriam Hansen, this paper analyzes the inclusion of these Iranian thrillers within international film festivals and the festival curators’ re-reading of these films as indicative of female experiences of cinema within Iranian cinema history. This paper is based upon qualitative interviews, participant observation, and archival analysis to assess the changing history of Iranian thrillers when placed in the context of an international film festival focusing on the “rediscovery” of lost or forgotten cinematic works. Although Khachikian established a trend in thriller filmmaking in Iran, his attention to female characters and female participation in production was an outlier in an industry dominated by assumptions of a male spectator. The selective act of preserving and incorporating such films within a transnational context alters the memory of Khachikian’s films, building a nostalgia of “rediscovery” for Iranian thrillers.