The article was published in Vu de Pro-Fil no. 65 as an introduction to the special dossier on Iranian cinema. The online edition appears with a six-month delay, i.e., from mid-March 2026.
Land of A Thousand and One Nights and Persian poetry, Iran has turned cinema into the art of suggestion: when speech is monitored, the image becomes a poem and editing a figure of style.
You don’t enter this country-as-cinema as you would push open a door; you open it like a book of ghazals — following discreet rhymes, eloquent silences, and metaphors that speak volumes. In this story, Abbas Kiarostami emerges as the tutelary figure of modern Iranian cinema. From the 1970s onward, and then after the 1979 revolution, he set a manner: seemingly simple tales, children, roads, hills; a frame that breathes and gives the viewer room to think. Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Close-Up (1990) and Taste of Cherry (1997) are not merely films; they are methods of seeing. With him, an Iranian grammar takes shape: reality as backdrop, fiction as hypothesis, and ethics as watermark.
But in Iran, politics enters the frame early. Cinema falls under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance: scripts to be submitted, shoots to be authorised, release permits to be obtained. Censorship isn’t a spectacular pair of scissors; it’s an indelible marker running through the writing — from synopsis to poster. One learns to speak of love with a look (Shirin, Abbas Kiarostami, 2008), of anger with a static shot (A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, 2011), of defiance with a door left ajar (Offside, Jafar Panahi, 2006). Filmmakers have developed a virtuosity of allusion that Hafez (1315–1390) would have recognised: when you can’t name, you suggest; when you can’t show, you tell otherwise. Metaphor isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival system.
At the heart of this tension lies the question of women. In front of the camera the rules of representation are strict: hijab in all circumstances—even in fictional intimacy; no physical contact between actors; infinite caution around sensitive subjects. Behind the camera, major women authors — Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Forough Farrokhzad, Samira Makhmalbaf — have nonetheless imposed a voice that articulates everyday life, the desire for emancipation, and dignity. Part of Iranian cinema could be summed up thus: telling stories of women whose speech is prevented, by finding a form that makes that speech undeniable. Sometimes it’s a close-up, sometimes an eloquent absence; often it’s an edit that leaves room for the off-screen — where everything happens.
This politics of form has produced a constellation. Jafar Panahi shoots under house arrest (This Is Not a Film, 2011; Taxi Tehran, 2015) and turns constraint into a manifesto of freedom. Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his family explore cinema as a workshop and social laboratory, founding the Makhmalbaf Film House in 1996 to produce their own. Asghar Farhadi braids moral drama and courtroom thriller with a watchmaker’s dramaturgy, where every gesture weighs something and truth always has a blind spot (About Elly, 2009; The Past, 2013; Everybody Knows, 2018). International festivals recognise, consecrate, sometimes protect — at the price of a difficult circulation of works inside the country. Between cinema and living-room, between what’s permitted and forbidden, Iranian cinema invents byways: smartphones, lightweight shoots, far-flung co-producers, endless stratagems. When the official road is blocked, one takes the poetic path.
This inventiveness springs from necessity: to speak at human height when public speech falters. Hence films cleave to modest gestures: a lost notebook (Where Is the Friend’s Home?, Kiarostami, 1987), a car pulled over (Ten, Kiarostami, 2002), a summons (A Separation, Farhadi, 2011), an administrative corridor (Tehran Chronicles, Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami, 2023). Heroism isn’t spectacular; it consists in persevering, negotiating, saying no with the delicacy of a yes. “Keeping it simple” isn’t a shortcut; it’s an art.
This tradition finds a limpid echo in Tehran Chronicles (Ayeh-haye zamini) by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami. The film proceeds by vignettes — so many Persian miniatures in which each scene frames a face-off with bureaucratic absurdity: a request, a rule, a counter, and the quiet obstinacy of someone who simply wants to live. The mise-en-scène adopts a gentle rigor: locked-off shots, clean compositions, humour without cruelty. We often smile—humour of resistance, humour of lucidity—and beneath the laughter we feel the gravity of a society wrestling with contradictory norms. This isn’t a pamphlet; it’s a civic poetry, where formal elegance becomes both protection and blade.
The jewel here lies in accuracy: no inflation, no posturing, but weighed words and active silences that let thought breathe. Tehran Chronicles thus closes the circle begun at the start: in the land of A Thousand and One Nights and Persian verse, cinema remains an art of storytelling — an art that, night after night, scene after scene, reopens the possibility of meaning. One old wisdom returns: when the order of the world grows opaque, you light a lamp. In Iran, that lamp takes the shape of a screen. And when it lights up, faces, voices and ordinary gestures become extraordinary again — in other words, human.