Popular films from the mid-twentieth century, known as filmfarsi, were once the basis for the industrialization of cinema in Iran. Following the Islamic Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, those films, essential to the economic and structural mechanics of the previous film industry, were banned in favor of a cinema promoting an idealized Islamic subject. Half a century after the earliest filmfarsi productions, these films have come to epitomize alternative viewing modes as they find new audiences amongst the global Iranian diaspora through video-sharing websites. This paper investigates the unregulated distribution between Iranian nationals and global diaspora communities through which these midcentury filmfarsi have appeared online. I position this film leakage as a means by which diasporic nostalgia is re-invoked, and globally-dispersed Iranians bridge their geographic distance through localized Internet engagement of filmfarsi viewing culture. By tracing the history of preserved filmfarsi from Iranian collectors to diasporic distributors, I argue that preserved filmfarsi, which had once been essential to Iran’s national cinema, now collapses geographic demarcations of the Iranian film industry. This industrial past finds new form in digitized filmfarsi that invigorates diasporic claims over the film tradition that had once embodied Iranian territorial nationalism and commercialism. Further, the Iranian diaspora’s reclamation of a digitized filmfarsi through the Internet becomes conveniently viewable with portable devices like laptops and cellphones thus signaling Persian-speaking communities’ personalized engagement with a longed-for and lost Iranian past. In this study, I participate in observation and interviewing of both videostore owners converting and selling filmfarsi, and diaspora individuals sharing videos and commenting on video-sharing sites. Through this method, I trace filmfarsi’s unlicensed circulation that relies upon individual actors rather than corporate distributors. Addressing diasporic filmfarsi distribution and circulation, I focus on both the physical exchange of films and the online comment- and request-culture that celebrates the availability of these banned films. While Iranian filmmakers and critics once demonized filmfarsi for pandering purely to audience demands for sex and intrigue, diaspora communities’ free circulation of the films has de-commercialized the works, allowing for a renegotiation of their cultural value in terms of nostalgia. Further, I address how individuals shape virtual communities that, as Arjun Appadurai argues, defy geographic borders of national cinemas. Although diaspora communities often function at the margins of their host society and homeland, globalizing technology allows them to reconfigure their communities putting them at the center of new technologically-engaged public spheres.