Cinema has been a part of Iran for nearly its entire history. Though the work of Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi is no longer extant—he who, as the official photographer of Muzaffar al-Din Shah, shot the country’s earliest known footage on a camera obtained from Paris in 1900—his story speaks to the state’s enduring influence on its imagery.
In particular, Iran’s cinematic identity over the past century has been characterized by the contestation of hegemonic forces, both secular and fundamentalist. In the first New Wave that took shape in the 1960s, a generation of filmmakers developed innovative methods for poetically evoking the pervasive sense of societal decay under the rule of Reza Pahlavi. That work would continue following Pahlavi’s exile in 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), as any promises of democratic pluralism were largely left by the wayside.
So what can we glean from Iran’s films and filmmakers now, amid the civilian uprisings that threaten to topple the current regime? It’s foolhardy—at times, even outright dangerous—to look at any collection of films as a faithful account of Iran’s complex cultural or political history. But given the country’s seemingly innate knack for self-interrogation through image-making, the cinema of Iran often yields a stirring humanism, one that rebukes the rhetoric of neoconservative war hawks abroad and fundamentalist patriarchs within.
Here are six films that broadly trace the arc from the twilight of the Qajar dynasty to the volatile tumult of the present.
Chess of the Wind (1976)
Mohammad Reza Aslani’s 1976 masterpiece, rediscovered after languishing in obscurity for decades (the director’s son famously stumbled upon the negatives in a flea market), places its Gothic tale in the liminal space between the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties. This slipperiness isn’t readily apparent as the film follows the machinations of Lady Aghdas (Fakhri Khorvash) and her maid (Shoreh Aghdashloo) to wrest control of her mother’s estate from her loutish stepfather (Mohamad Ali Keshavarz) and his conniving nephews.
Yet the allusions to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 are instrumental to Aslani’s philosophy of history as not merely a catalogue of the past, but a set of “deterministic principles.” The film was partially shot at the Moshir ad-Dowleh Mansion, where the Persian Constitution of 1906 was written—the document that effectively signaled the beginning of the modern era in Iran’s history, though subsequent years saw those initial steps toward democracy scuppered by the 1921 coup that installed Reza Khan as Iran’s leader. In a series of cutaways to washerwomen discussing the late matriarch, one conversation briefly references the conscription that was passed into law in 1925. This subtly foreshadows Aslani’s ending, which breaks out of the manicured dollhouse of his drama to linger on a panoramic shot of contemporary Tehran. More than a period piece, Chess of the Wind is a thesis on historical tumult as a continuum in Iran’s struggle against institutional corruption.