The Fall of a Shah is the story of the rise and fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The film includes exclusive interviews with some of the people closest to the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini. The film picks up where Bahari’s previous film, An Iranian Odyssey, finishes: the return of the Shah to power after the CIA coup in 1953. By digging out rare archival footage from BBC’s archives, Bahari tells the story of a man whose ambitions to modernise Iran were eventually overshadowed by his megalomania. The film is not much about how the revolution happened. It rather explores why the Shah was toppled and Ayatollah Khomeini replaced him. The inclusion of BBC reports from 1948 until 1979 is also a commentary on the state of the media and how little they understood what was going in Iran. Even though Ayatollah Khomeini started his campaign against the Shah in 1963, he is not in any of the BBC’s “in-depth” reportings. The Fall of a Shah is ultimately is about the power of religion to create surprising social and political upheavals.