How Iranian cinema has captured its changing society through the decades

Sepanta also starred in the film, which was shot in Bombay (now Mumbai) under the Imperial Film Company banner. Featuring Roohangiz Saminejad as the lead, along with Hadi Shirazi and Sohrab Puri, the film was an instant hit when it debuted in Iranian theatres. At a time when audiences were accustomed to European comedies and politically charged animated shorts, Lor Girl was the fulfilment of Iran’s quest to tell its own story on celluloid, in its own language.

First Iranian woman on screen

The film, released two years before Reza Shah Pahlavi officially changed the country’s name from Persia to Iran, follows Golnar (Saminejad), a teahouse girl kidnapped as a child by a group of bandits in Lorestan. As she comes of age, the gang leader Gholi Khan sets his sights on her, but she falls in love with Jafar, a government emissary sent to subdue the lawlessness in the region.

After a dramatic escape involving violence and narrow survival, the couple flees to Bombay, which brings to mind the real-life migration of many Iranians during post-WWI instability. Eventually, they returned to Iran once Reza Shah’s new regime brought a semblance of order. Sepanta later admitted that its pro-Pahlavi message was aligned with government propaganda but also helped stir national pride, especially among the expatriate community.

Also read: Why Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has been sentenced to 8 years in prison

Ironically, after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini banned Saminejad’s films and denounced her as ‘corrupt and prostitute’, lumping her with the broader vilification of women in performing arts. Saminejad, the wife of a film company employee who became the first Iranian woman to act in a film, had been cast by Sepanta after a long and fruitless search for a woman willing to appear on screen. She acted only once more, in Shirin and Farhad, before leaving cinema forever.

As film historian Hamid Reza Sadr notes, she faced relentless social ostracism and sexual harassment from men when she went out in public, which forced her to abandon her identity, change her name, and live the rest of her life in anonymity and seclusion until she died in 1997 at the age of 80.

Rise of Urban revenge/noir dramas

Lor Girl, however, started a story and lit a spark that would stretch across decades, even under censorship, holding a mirror to Iranian society. Cinema in Iran, thus, has long been a way to say what cannot be said, to remember what must not be forgotten.

By the 1960s, this conversation turned urgent. In her beautiful and brutal film, The House Is Black (1963), the iconoclastic poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad, who died in a car accident at the age of 32 in 1967, reframed leprosy as a metaphor for society’s refusal to see its own suffering.

The House Is Black, in a way, marked the philosophical turn that would shape the Iranian New Wave, which had started four years ago with Hajir Darioush’s second film Serpent’s Skin (1963). Based on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was banned in India and several other countries for its depiction of female desire, it starred Fakhri Khorvash (known for later films like Chess of the Wind, Plunder and A House in Darkness) and Jamshid Mashayekhi,

One of the movement’s defining voices was Dariush Mehrjui (1939-2023), whose 1969 film The Cow told the story of Masht Hassan, a rural villager so emotionally bound to his only cow that when it dies, he loses his grip on reality, eventually believing he is the cow. With haunting performances and real-life depiction of village life, The Cow examined poverty, mental health, and the slow erosion of rural mores.

That same year, Masoud Kimiai’s Qeysar, which delved into the grittier masculinity of urban Iran and started a new trend for noir dramas centred on avenging outraged family honour, was released. It tells the story of a brooding anti-hero (Behrooz Vossoughi), who comes home to find his sister has killed herself after being raped, and his older brother has been murdered while trying to take revenge.

Also read: The Seed of the Sacred Fig: A harrowing political drama on women’s protests in Iran

What follows is a bloody journey through Tehran, as Qeysar hunts down the three brothers responsible, killing them one by one in blood-splattered set pieces like a public bath, a slaughterhouse, and finally, a railway yard. Along the way, he briefly reconnects with an old flame, but love has to wait: he’s a man on a mission.

The film ends in tragedy, with Qeysar wounded and cornered by the police after completing his revenge. With its dark style and tough emotions, Qeysar became a massive hit and inspired a wave of similar films. But after the Revolution a decade later, it was banned for promoting violence and immoral behaviour. Still, it remains one of the most powerful films ever made in Iran.

Tales of childhood and poverty

Through the 1970s, Iranian cinema continued to reflect a society in flux. Mohsen Makhmalbaf (known for films like Gabbeh, The Cyclist, A Moment of Innocence, Kandahar, etc), Abbas Kiarostami (the director of Close-Up, The Wind Will Carry Us, Taste of Cherry, Take Me Home, Future Reloaded and many other gems), and others made fables that used minimalism and non-professional actors to evoke profound truths about Iran. Kiarostami’s school-set shorts in the ’70s showed children coming to terms with adult systems and social dysfunctions.

Then came 1979. The Islamic Revolution changed the grammar of Iranian cinema. What could be shown, said, or even implied was restructured by Islamic law. But what’s remarkable is that filmmakers, far from being coerced into silence, adapted and found new and ingenious ways to tell their stories. War films rose in prominence during the Iran-Iraq war. Domestic dramas had to subtly negotiate the moral codes imposed by the state. A new poetic realism came to the fore and allegory became the default mode for many films.

During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), there were new cultural guidelines. The government encouraged “Sacred Defense” films — propaganda war films with religious undertones —while suppressing pre-revolution “Filmfarsi” melodramas. However, once again, within these constraints, filmmakers found creative avenues.

A perceptible change in the 1980s was that Iranian cinema gradually pivoted from overt wartime narratives to intimate tales of childhood, identity, and social fracture. Amir Naderi’s The Runner (1984), inspired by his own boyhood, proved to be a landmark: shot in the port city of Abadan, it follows an orphaned boy (Madjid Niroumand), who scavenges bottles and chases airplanes and trains; his restless longing symbolise Iran’s own desires for escape and modernity.

Similarly, Makhmalbaf’s Dastforoush (The Peddler, 1987), a trilogy of short films short in three different styles with different cinematographers, interwove the story of a struggling couple with multiple disabled children to highlight the desperation and the post-war hardscrabble lives of the marginalised in Iran.

By the mid-1980s, auteurs like Kiarostami and screenwriters and film editors like Bahram Beyzai were working on giving Iranian cinema an altogether new idiom. Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) used the small quest of a schoolboy retrieving a lost notebook to explore themes of moral duty, childhood innocence, and rural disparities.

How filmmakers cope with censorship

The 1990s and early 2000s saw a flowering of global recognition. At the forefront were directors like Majid Majidi, who chose to show humanism in his films. His breakout film, Children of Heaven (1997), told the story of a brother and sister who share a single pair of shoes, a premise simple but profoundly moving in its exploration of dignity in poverty. The film was Iran’s first Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and was lauded owing largely to its emotional universality.

Majidi’s cinema, replete with children and working-class characters, depict the everyday struggles of the Iranian people. In his 1999 film, The Color of Paradise, a blind boy’s deep connection with nature and God is painfully contrasted with his father’s shame and ambition. In Baran (2001), a young Iranian boy falls in love with an Afghan refugee girl, and their silent romance becomes a gentle critique of xenophobia and inequality.

Unlike the confrontational symbolism of his contemporaries, Majidi’s films work through emotion, gesture, and silence in order to create moral parables grounded in the lives of the unseen. While some critics view his work as less politically sharp, his films are ethically resonant that slip past censorship and still manage to move hearts worldwide.

Asghar Farhadi, known for films like Dancing in the Dust (2003), The Beautiful City (2004) and Fireworks Wednesday (2006), brought an incisive ethical lens to domestic dramas. His Oscar-winning A Separation (2011) introduced the world to Nader (Payman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami), a couple seeking divorce, whose private crisis spirals into a very public legal battle. The film subtly touches upon class divides, gender expectations, and filial duty. Its ambiguity leaves us with the conclusion that no one is wholly wrong, but everyone is partly lost.

In The Salesman (2016), Farhadi layered Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman over a story of personal violation and social shame. When Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is assaulted in a new apartment, her husband Emad (Shahab Hosseini) sets out for retribution that turns inward. Trust erodes. Silence spreads. And Farhadi, once again, takes viewers into the whorls of an ethical labyrinth in a psychological thriller.

Meanwhile, another current of resistance ran underground. Jafar Panahi, banned from filmmaking in 2010, defied the order of the Islamic Republic by turning the ban itself into cinema. In This Is Not a Film (2011), he filmed himself in his Tehran apartment, tracing ideas with tape on the carpet. His later works, like Taxi (2015) and 3 Faces (2018), use the city itself as a stage, its people as truth-tellers, its taxis and villages as confessional booths.

A conversation with itself

Panahi’s latest, It Was Just an Accident (2025), may be his most politically daring yet. A co-production between Iran, France, and Luxembourg, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 2025. The film begins with a man nicknamed “Peg Leg” (Ebrahim Azizi), whose distinctive prosthetic leg squeaks as he drives with his pregnant wife and child.

When his car breaks down, a former political prisoner, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), recognises that sound and kidnaps him, convinced he is his torturer. However, there is a bit of uncertainty: Vahid was blindfolded during torture, and the man insists he is innocent.

Also read: Cracked mirror: The cinema of the infinitely resilient women of Iran

Joined by other ex-prisoners — a bookseller, a wedding photographer, a bride and groom, and a rage-filled worker — Vahid’s makeshift tribunal debates revenge, mercy, and moral justice. Panahi shot the film covertly in Iran without government approval, drawing on his own history of imprisonment into a taut, richly human drama about violence and memory.

In a statement after the Cannes win, he said: “This Palme d’Or is not just for me, but for every artist who dares to speak truth to power... The most important thing is our country and the freedom of our country. Let’s arrive at this moment, together, when no one dares to say what we should wear, what we should or shouldn’t do.”

Last year, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, also made in exile, won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes and earned an Oscar nomination. Shot secretly in Iran and finished in Germany, is a tense thriller woven into the fabric of Iran’s 2022 ‘Zan, Zendegi. Azadi’ (Woman, Life, Freedom) protests. The story centres on Iman (Missagh Zareh), a newly appointed Revolutionary Court investigator whose licensed gun goes missing, sparking suspicion and fear within his own home.

As his daughters secretly support protests and his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) struggles between loyalty towards her husband and love for her daughters, Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki), Iman’s role transforms their family into a microcosm of power, trust, and repression. When his paranoia increases, the film morphs into a suspenseful chase across Tehran before culminating in what’s one of the powerful climaxes in recent Iranian films.
Iranian cinema has also found a new canvas: animation. At the 2025 Oscars, In the Shadow of the Cypress, a 20‑minute, dialogue-free animated short by Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi won Best Animated Short at the 2025 Oscars, the first time Iranian animators have ever won in this category.

The film follows a former sea captain living by the coast with his daughter, both affected by his PTSD. Their world is shaken when they discover a beached whale, and through their silent struggle to save it, the film beautifully explores trauma, healing, and hope, using powerful visuals and no words. Cinema has become the longest-running, most vital conversation Iran has been having with itself, its people. And the world has been listening. And watching.