The Cow

Gaav (The Cow) is where the Iranian New Wave begins. Before Kiarostami, before Panahi, before Farhadi, there was Mehrjui's stark, allegorical masterpiece about a man, his cow, and a village that decided the truth was too dangerous.

The setup is deceptively simple. Mash Hassan (Ezzatolah Entezami) is the only cow-owner in a poor village. The cow is his identity, his status, his reason for being. When it dies mysteriously while Hassan is away, the villagers panic and conspire to tell him it ran away. Hassan, already fragile, cannot process the loss. By the end, he has become the cow — eating hay, mooing, crawling on all fours.

The film was banned by the Shah's regime, ostensibly because the depiction of rural poverty was "backward" and unflattering to Iran's modernizing image. The real reason was likely its implicit critique of a society that denies its people the dignity of truth. It was smuggled out of the country and premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1971, where it won the FIPRESCI prize.

Ayatollah Khomeini, improbably, was a fan — he reportedly said Gaav showed "the real Iran" and cited it when he allowed the film industry to continue after the 1979 Revolution, provided it served "moral" ends. An unlikely endorsement for an unlikely masterpiece.