Where to Begin With Iranian Cinema — The Five Films That Will Open a World So Vast and So Unlike Anything You Have Seen That You Will Never Watch Cinema the Same Way Again
Iranian cinema is the most consistently great national cinema of the last fifty years and the most inaccessible to Indian audiences not because of language or distribution but because nobody has told them where the door is. Here it is. Walk through it in this order.
Before the films, a context that will make them richer.
Iranian cinema after the 1979 revolution developed under conditions that should have destroyed it. State censorship was severe. Violence was prohibited. Sexuality was prohibited. Criticism of the government was prohibited. Female actors could not appear on screen without hijab. The range of stories a filmmaker could tell, the visual grammar available to them, the subjects they could approach directly — all of these were radically constrained.
What happened instead of destruction is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of any art form. The constraints produced a cinema of extraordinary formal ingenuity. Filmmakers who could not show violence directly found ways to suggest it that were more disturbing than any direct depiction. Filmmakers who could not show intimacy found ways to express desire and loneliness that were more specific and more truthful than explicit representation. Filmmakers who could not criticise the state directly found ways to examine Iranian society that were more penetrating than any frontal political film.
The result is a body of work that looks, on the surface, deceptively simple — natural light, non-professional actors, stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things — and contains, beneath that surface, some of the most formally sophisticated and morally complex cinema ever made.
Here are the five films. In this order.
Film 1: Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987) · Abbas Kiarostami Available: MUBI India
Begin here because it is the gentlest entry point into Iranian cinema and the one that most completely establishes what the tradition values. A young boy in a village discovers that he has accidentally taken his classmate's notebook and must return it before the classmate is expelled for not having it. He sets off to find the friend's house. That is the entire film.
What Kiarostami does with this material is the first lesson in what Iranian cinema does differently from any other national cinema. He films the landscape of northern Iran — the stepped fields, the winding paths, the specific quality of the light — with the same attention he gives to the boy's face. The landscape is not background. It is a presence, as real and as morally weighted as any human character. The film asks, without ever stating, whether a child's conscience is worth more than adult convenience. It answers, without ever stating, yes.
Watch it slowly. Resist the urge to fast-forward through the landscape shots. The landscape is the film.
Film 2: Close-Up (1990) · Abbas Kiarostami Available: MUBI India
The second film is a harder film and you will understand it better for having watched the first. A real man — Hossain Sabzian — impersonated the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to gain the confidence and hospitality of a middle-class Tehran family. He was discovered, arrested, and tried. Kiarostami filmed the trial and then, with the cooperation of all parties, reconstructed the events that led to it — with the actual people playing themselves.
Close-Up is simultaneously a documentary, a fiction film, and a philosophical inquiry into the relationship between the two. At what point does a reconstruction become a fiction? If the person playing themselves in a reconstruction is performing a version of their own experience, are they acting? What does it mean that Sabzian — who impersonated a filmmaker because he loved cinema so deeply he wanted to be inside it — is now inside a film about his own life?
These questions are not asked directly. They are built into the film's structure. After Close-Up you will never again watch a documentary without asking what it is reconstructing and what the reconstruction costs.
Film 3: The Taste of Cherry (1997) · Abbas Kiarostami Available: MUBI India
The third film will test you and the test is the point. A middle-aged man drives through the hills outside Tehran, stopping to pick up passengers and asking each one the same question: will you help me die? He has chosen a spot, dug a hole, and needs someone to cover him with earth after he takes pills. He offers money. Nobody agrees easily.
Kiarostami films this almost entirely from inside the car, the landscape scrolling past the windows, the conversations filling the car's interior with a specific quality of philosophical weight. The film is about death the way Chekhov's stories are about death — obliquely, through the responses of the living, through what people reveal about themselves when asked to engage with another person's ending.
The final sequence has generated more critical debate than almost any ending in cinema history. It does not resolve the film. It reframes it entirely. Go in without knowing what happens.
Film 4: The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) · Abbas Kiarostami Available: MUBI India
By the fourth film you are ready to go deeper into Kiarostami's world. A film crew arrives in a remote Kurdish village ostensibly to film a woman's death ritual. The crew leader — who we follow but never fully understand — waits for an old woman to die. She does not die. He waits. The village continues its life around him.
What Kiarostami is doing here is something almost no other filmmaker attempts — building a film around an absence. The old woman never appears on screen. The death ritual is never filmed. The reason the crew is there is never fully explained. The film exists entirely in the space between what we are shown and what we are not shown, and that space turns out to contain more meaning than most films that show everything.
After The Wind Will Carry Us you are ready for the full range of Iranian cinema beyond Kiarostami.
Film 5: A Separation (2011) · Asghar Farhadi Available: Amazon Prime Video
The fifth film is the one that will show you where Iranian cinema went after Kiarostami — more narratively driven, more focused on social dynamics, more directly engaged with contemporary Iranian urban life. Farhadi's Academy Award-winning film about a couple separating, a caregiver accused of a crime, and the specific way that Iranian society — its class dynamics, its religious obligations, its legal system — determines the outcome of a human conflict, is the most accessible great Iranian film and the best possible transition to the wider tradition.
After A Separation watch The Salesman, About Elly, and Farhadi's complete filmography. Then return to the Kiarostami films you watched first and discover how much more you understand about them now.
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