In October 1971, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, threw a party at Persepolis to mark 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, flying in kings, presidents, and celebrities to a tent city built by a Paris design house, with food flown in from Maxim's and place settings from Limoges. The film uses archive footage, newsreel, and interviews to reconstruct the event from the inside, tracing the logistics of building an air-conditioned pleasure palace in the desert and the political calculations behind such a display of Persian imperial glory. It also tracks the gap between the spectacle and the country beyond the tents, where poverty and repression under the Shah's secret police, SAVAK, were fueling resentment that would erupt in the 1979 revolution. Historians and journalists set the party against the economic and religious pressures building in Iran at the time, arguing that the celebration became a symbol of the monarchy's disconnection from its own people. The film treats the party less as a curiosity than as a preview of the regime's collapse eight years later.