There is a moment in The Cow (1969) — the film widely credited with launching the Iranian New Wave — when the villagers realise that Mash Hassan's beloved cow has died. They huddle in a cramped room, lit by a single oil lamp, and debate what to tell him. He has already begun to unravel. He moos at night. He eats hay.
Dariush Mehrjui's film was banned for two years by the Shah's regime, not because it was explicitly political, but because its portrait of rural poverty was implicitly so — a devastating depiction of a village where the loss of a single cow is an existential catastrophe. When the ban was lifted in 1971, The Cow became a sensation, winning the FIPRESCI prize at Venice and announcing to the world that something extraordinary was happening in Iranian cinema.
Art in the Time of Censorship
What makes the Iranian New Wave one of the great cinematic movements of the twentieth century is precisely the condition that should have made it impossible: censorship. After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic imposed strict moral codes on filmmaking. Women had to wear hijab on screen. Physical contact between unrelated men and women was prohibited. Political critique had to be veiled, allegorical, indirect.
And so Iranian directors developed a cinematic language of extraordinary subtlety. They learned to say everything by appearing to say nothing. A child's search for a lost pair of shoes becomes a study of poverty and honour (Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven, 1997). A man driving through the hills of Tehran looking for someone to bury him after his suicide becomes a meditation on the meaning of life (Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, 1997). A family drama about a couple divorcing becomes an X-ray of Iranian society in the twenty-first century (Farhadi's A Separation, 2011).
Kiarostami: The Philosopher in the Passenger Seat
Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016, was the movement's towering figure. His Close-Up (1990) is a film that should not exist — a documentary about a real trial in which a poor man, Hossain Sabzian, impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and insinuated himself into a wealthy family's home. Kiarostami got permission to film the trial. He then got permission to re-stage some of the events with the actual participants playing themselves.
The result is not quite documentary, not quite fiction — a hybrid form that questions the very nature of truth and representation. Sabzian, when asked why he did it, says simply: "I wanted to be someone." In that sentence is an entire sociology of class, aspiration, and the dignity of the poor.
Farhadi: The Moralist
If Kiarostami was the philosopher, Asghar Farhadi is the moralist. His films — A Separation, The Salesman, About Elly, Fireworks Wednesday — are constructed like courtroom dramas in which the audience is the jury. No character is entirely right. No character is entirely wrong. The truth is always distributed, partial, contested.
A Separation (2011) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the first Iranian film to do so. Its depiction of a couple divorcing — she wants to leave Iran for a better life for their daughter; he must stay to care for his Alzheimer's-stricken father — is a masterclass in moral complexity. The film's central question — who is responsible? — spirals outward to encompass class, gender, religion, and law.
An Unfinished Arc
The Iranian New Wave is not a concluded chapter. It continues in the work of Jafar Panahi, who makes films under house arrest. It continues in Taxi Tehran (2015), a film Panahi shot entirely inside a taxi while banned from filmmaking. It continues in the diaspora, in films like Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
What unites this fifty-year tradition is a commitment to cinema as a form of truth-telling under constraints that would silence a lesser art form. The films are quiet, patient, observational — and devastating. They ask you to look, really look, at the texture of ordinary life in Iran: the tea glasses, the traffic, the courtyard fountains, the doorways where women pause before entering. In that texture is an entire civilisation.