More than 350 foreign guests, selected from hundreds of applicants, traveled to the Iranian capital to see 35 films have premieres at the festival, held in a modern shopping center in downtown Tehran. There were Russians, Indians, Georgians, Europeans, Iraqis, Syrians and others. Concerts of film music were held at some locations. Some people visited Tehran’s Cinema Museum or an exhibition of French art by the Louvre, while others made a pilgrimage to the city’s sprawling cemetery, where they paid respects to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war.

“We want to show people that we are not North Korea,” said Reza Kianian, a prominent Iranian actor who is a festival ambassador. “When our guests walk on the streets they see a church, a mosque and a synagogue all in the same block,” he said. “This is not the country you think it is.”

Iran’s award-winning cinema is another example, Mr. Kianian said. Two of the director Asghar Farhadi’s films have won Academy Awards for best foreign language film — “A Separation” in 2012 and “The Salesman” in 2017. “With the festival and inviting so many foreign guests we also want to show that while we have hard-liners, most of our artists are not like this,” he added.

Iranians often suffer from the image presented by “death-to-America” shouting hard-liners, an extremist view not shared by the majority of Iranians.