There is a joke I heard from an old professor when I was a graduate student (at least I thought he was kidding—the guy was from Harvard, so he might have been serious): “Never offer expert commentary about any country you have not flown over at least once.” Inspired by the fact that one of Mid Century Cinema’s senior writers just finished an essay about Abbas Kiarostami’s remarkable The Wind Will Carry Us (look for it in the autumn Cineaste), we now add this corollary: It is a good idea to have a passing familiarity with countries that you bomb.
In that spirit, here are nine or ten Iranian films worth watching. We recommend them, wholeheartedly, simply as movies, but they also offer an opportunity to remember that although that country is currently ruled by a band of repressive theocrats (the sort of standard issue religious zealots you can find all over the world, including in Afghanistan, the U.S. Congress, and the Israeli Cabinet, among other places), Iran, a country of ninety million people, is a complex and multifaceted society, and one with an especially rich cinematic tradition.
Filmmakers in Iran have long labored under oppressive censorship, and are often hounded by the secret police (imagine a society where the security services of the government cover their faces!), first under the authoritarian regime of the Shah, and, subsequently (since 1979), by the moral overlords of Islamic Republic. Yet even under these conditions, great movies have been made. These films also express, as is so often the case, both the thrilling universality of cinema, and the commonality of human troubles and aspirations across disparate societies. Or as Kiarostami put it, invoking Rossellini, Bresson, and especially Ozu as influences on his work, “my toothache is no different from an American’s or a Frenchman’s.”
Here are some of our favorites, in (loosely) chronological order:
Where is the Friends House? (1987) Possibly our favorite film by Kiarostami, it is the culmination of his many boy-on-the-move pictures, as a child urgently searches for, you guessed it, his friend’s house, on a desperate mission to set right a mix-up that would surely cause enormous trouble at school. Friend’s House features the director’s classic blending of documentary and drama, and his fondness for remote locations, and, remarkably, although the stakes sound low, the suspense is acute and sustained throughout. Kiarostami made a dozen movies well worth seeking out, but we recommend following this one with something completely different, and an outlier on his oeuvre, the Tehran set, pre-revolutionary marital drama The Report (1977), which is currently streaming on the Criterion channel.
Fireworks Wednesday (2006) Asghar Farhadi is one of our favorite filmmakers, and I consider The Past (2013) to be one of the great films of this century—but that was a European production. For his Iranian pictures, start with Fireworks, his third feature, which we have described elsewhere as “a flat-out masterpiece that achieves Cassavetes-like levels of intensity. A young woman is dispatched by an agency as a day-maid to a tension-filled household (the husband is suspected of having an affair; the evidence is ambiguous; neighbors and in-laws are implicated). The story sounds simple, but it is not. Once again revelations are serially uncovered, forcing the audience, repeatedly, to reassess all that has come before.” Follow this with Farhadi’s celebrated A Separation (2011) which won the Academy Award for best international film.
Disappearance (2017) We stumbled across this one, an excellent, nuanced, modestly scaled film about a young Iranian couple in crisis and on the run, into the long night. When screening this intense, gripping drama, you might catch yourself saying, “thank goodness this couldn’t happen here”—but actually this story could be set in Texas without changing a plot point. Disappearance is the least well known of the films discussed here. But it can be tracked down, and we remain on the lookout for more features by writer-director Ali Asgari, who, not surprisingly, has run afoul of the authorities.
Three Faces (2018) Another Mid Century Cinema favorite, Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces was the fourth film he made after . . . being banned from filmmaking. (One of his surreptitiously shot efforts was smuggled out of the country on a flash drive hidden in a wedding cake.) Filmed in the east Azerbaijan province in Northwestern Iran, and initially unfolding as a road movie in which Panahi plays himself, 3 Faces emerges, implicitly, as a study of the challenges faced by three generations of Iranian women, and in our estimation it is the best of his shot-in-secret features. Panahi won the grand prize at this year’s Cannes film festival for his new drama, It was Just an Accident, which should be released in the U.S. in October, with an eye toward landing an Academy Award nomination. Until then, check out Crimson Gold (2003), which Richard Brody well-described as “a thrillingly original revitalization of the crime drama,” which “connects the crime inextricably with Iranian society as a whole.”
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) Another film shot secretly, the idea for this production emerged when writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, then serving an eight month prison sentence, was inspired by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that erupted in September 2022, after the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody, who had been arrested by the morality police for wearing her headscarf improperly. Sacred Fig, which we discussed at length with Rasoulof in an interview earlier this year for the Boston Review (“Sitting on that chair, blindfolded, with the interrogator behind me, is a moment that I have experienced myself”), integrates real footage from the bloody crackdown of those protests into a harrowing family drama. As the film completed production, Rasoulof, convicted for producing “propaganda against the system” was forced to flee his native country on foot. To return to our theme of a universal cinema, we recommend screening next Rasoulof’s A Man of Integrity (2017), which, as we wrote, “Despite its distinct local features, global audiences will recognize [it] as a classic “urban corruption” drama that features parasitic local potentates nefariously pulling the strings of municipal political machines.”
The Sealed Soil (1977) A supplementary selection (we did say “nine or ten” movies): Currently making the rounds on the Art House scene is the restoration of this long lost movie, the earliest extant film made by an Iranian woman (made in secret while the Shah still ruled). Comparable to some of the celebrated films of Chantal Akerman (but not the ones we favor) Sealed Soil is of historical significance, jaw-dropping and brave in its unabashed feminism, and includes a scene of a woman in the rain that is little short of thrilling. Ultimately, however, I was bored. But what do I know—Mr. Hoberman liked it, which should be good enough for you.
