Over the last decade and a half, there has been a steady stream of films whose financing, labor, and talent were shared between the Iranian and Lebanese film industries. Big-budget movies like 33 Days (dir. Jamal Shoorje, 2012) and Damascus Time (Ebrahim Hatamikia, 2018) have shown not only the financial and political connections between Iran and Lebanon but also their cultural exchanges. These contemporary exchanges were formalized in 2012 when Mohammad Hosseini, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and Gaby Layyoun, Lebanon’s Minister of Culture, met in Beirut to announce plans to expand cinematic collaborations between the two countries, including shared financing schemes and educational exchanges for cinema students. Film critics have often understood films like 33 Days and Damascus Time through the lens of contemporary geopolitics, claiming that the Iranian government is simply subsidizing Hezbollah propaganda through these collaborative efforts. However, such readings of these collaborations obscure a much longer history of cinematic exchanges between Iran and Lebanon—exchanges that have benefitted not just from proximity and trade routes between the two countries but also their cultural ties and global ambitions. This presentation considers perhaps the earliest example of a co-production between Iran and Lebanon: the 1967 film That Man from Tehran (dir. Frank Agrama). Shot in the tradition of the 1960s spy thriller, That Man from Tehran features famous actors from both Iran and Lebanon, including Iranian leading man Mohammad Ali Fardin and Lebanese diva Sabah. With an English-language script and an Egyptian-American director, the film is an example of blurred borders, even at a time when film industries in the region were seeking to establish tighter national bounds. In this presentation, I study That Man from Tehran’s production and reception history to challenge the idea that cultural exchanges between Iran and Lebanon are (a) entirely recent and (b) simply the result of political alliances. My analysis joins the work of other scholars who are documenting co-productions within the Global Majority and decentering North America and Europe as global financial and cultural capitals.