With the people of Iran now targeted by the goons currently running the United States and Israel, Donald Trump’s recent and explicit threat to destroy their very “civilization” has only lent even more agony to it all. The word conjurs the potential loss of a truly great five-thousand-year legacy in architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry. I feel a particular pang for Iranian cinema, which was already severely impaired by the repressive dictatorship of the Islamic Republic, with many filmmakers imprisoned or forced into exile.

However, important films continue to get made, often by expatriates. Jafar Panahi, for example, has been banned from filmmaking in Iran for the past twenty years and has been imprisoned several times. But he continues to work in France and to test the authority of the ayatollahs by periodic returns to Iran. His most recent film, It Was Just an Accident, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was a nominee for the Best International Feature Film Oscar at the Ninety-Eighth Academy Awards.

Panahi stated that, after the awards campaign, he intended to return to Iran, though he’s facing a one-year prison sentence. “If they want to put me back in prison, I’ll go,” he said back in February. “I’ll go to prison, and I’ll come out with a new script.” It was recently reported that he’d entered the country on March 31 “by land via Turkey due to flight restrictions.”

It shows an extraordinary degree of courage. Panahi has made many fierce statements about the danger he and his fellow Iranian filmmakers have long faced: “We fought against the restrictions; we created [art] despite the difficulties and the obstacles. And, the more that pressure increased, the harder we fought. One way or another, we battled to make films.”

But with the massive destruction of the US-Israeli war on Iran, one has to wonder — can this brilliant and unique cinema possibly continue to endure such a constant state of catastrophe?

No national cinema is more worthy of preservation than Iran’s. I used to teach a short section on the Iranian New Wave in my introductory course on film history at the University of California, Berkeley, and it was always such a pleasure to see students’ surprise and delight at these films’ combination of heartfelt realism and metacinematic sophistication.

Panahi’s The Mirror (1997), for example, is a fine example of the fresh inventiveness of Iranian New Wave films. It’s one of the many Iranian “children’s films,” with a typically harrowing structure in charting the course of a lost little girl named Mina (Mina Mohammad Khani) crossing the city of Tehran trying to get home from school after her mother fails to pick her up. At a pitifully tearful point midway through the film, Mina gets on a bus and is trying to negotiate her fare with the driver when she suddenly turns to glare at the camera, breaking the fourth wall. She hurls down her backpack and starts shrieking her head off. The camera pivots around to reveal an entire film crew seated in the bus filming her, pop-eyed at this screaming tantrum of their child star. It seems Mina the actor and first-grader is fed up with performing, especially fed up with having to cry all the time in one tearjerking children’s film after another, and she’s had it — she’s going home.

As the crew watches Mina stomp off the bus and walk away, the director realizes the little girl forgot to take off her mic. In a moment of inspiration that might save their film, they decide to pivot from fictional children’s film to a documentary children’s film and follow their child star on her journey in the opposite direction, back to her actual home.

This film is a marvel of entertainment with sociopolitical valance. It not only examines Iranian society in the form of people encountered and systems negotiated along the way; it also examines the genre of the children’s film. In Iran, these movies became popular because they allowed filmmakers to evade rigid rules of censorship imposed by the government. These rules especially impact the depiction of sexuality of any kind, which is strictly forbidden, or the always dangerous representation and participation of women, making stories centered on adults automatically fraught.

The children’s film provides the appearance of safe subject matter while sometimes allowing for remarkably critical examinations of Iranian society “through a child’s eyes.” The episodic journey structure characteristic of many of these films, in which the child tends to meet a wide variety of people from various classes and life situations, gave filmmakers a disguised method of exploring their society in a way that seemed unthreatening.

Iranian Cinema’s Long Boom Years

The Iranian New Wave actually consisted of several “waves” from the 1960s through the 2000s, attesting to its long-lasting effects. A complex and often inspirational film movement that combines realistic filmmaking aims with a postmodern approach that’s deeply humanistic, it was nothing like the slick, clever, “playful” pastiches of metadiegetic references and homages that tended to afflict American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Filmmakers such as Forough Farrokhzad (The House Is Black), Abbas Kiarostami (Where Is the Friend’s Home?, Through the Olive Trees, The Wind Will Carry Us, Taste of Cherry, Close-Up), Mohsen Makhmalbaf (A Moment of Innocence, Kandahar, The Gardener), and of course, Panahi (The Mirror, Crimson Gold, The White Balloon) are among those identified with the form.

The importance of fostering human connection in Iranian cinema is beautifully exemplified by The House Is Black (1963), a short film often seen as a “proto–Iranian New Wave” work for its layered, impassioned, and transformative use of documentary form — an approach that would go on to shape New Wave directors. It’s the only completed cinematic work of Forough Farrokhzad, a dazzling poet who died tragically young, and whose honesty about women’s experience made her a controversial figure in Iran even under the shah. Her film is, on one level, a documentary about the lives of people living in a remote leper colony. At a time when leprosy was highly treatable, their poverty keeps them from adequate medical care, meaning they endure the kind of punitive exile and lingering death experienced in premodern times.

The film forces the viewer to confront our own attitudes toward the perceived ugliness of the disease and the poignant beauty of the sufferers — the opening image is of a woman in a graceful headscarf regarding her own terribly ravaged face in a beautifully etched mirror. The community of the sufferers is portrayed as both heartening and harrowing as we witness their daily work, their meals, their rituals and celebrations, the children’s schooling and outdoor play, The soundtrack is dominated by two forms of discourse — the harshly rational, professional, male commentary of doctors and teachers versus the poetic, compassionate poetry of Farrokhzad herself, recited in her own voice and aching with empathy, a long lament to human woe that cries out for relief to a punitive god, inflected by references the Old Testament and the Quran.

The intensely emotive empathy of Farrokhzad, combined with documentary realism, inspired a number of Iranian New Wave filmmakers, who found ever deeper and more complex ways of expressing people’s plights within cruel social systems. It’s a strong trend in Iranian New Wave films to represent the film itself and aspects of the production process of making that film as a means of exploring the increasingly entangled and also deepening relationships of the characters, the actors playing the characters, and the director and crew as well. Filmmaking, in Iranian New Wave terms, by the very nature of its mimetic qualities and the intense desire of most people to be part of filmmaking if they get the chance, is almost always a means of arriving at greater mutual understanding.

How Iranian Cinema Blends Fact and Fiction Like No Other

For example, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (1996) represents his attempts to recreate the pivotal event of his youth when he, a teenage student dedicated to the cause of the Iranian Revolution, stabbed a policeman. Though the man survived, it was a criminal act for which Makhmalbaf spent a few years in prison.

In making the film, Makhmalbaf recreates his attempt to make amends twenty years later by finding the actual policeman he injured and involving him in the lengthy process of reenacting the long-ago stabbing and the circumstances surrounding it. Together they cast their youthful alter egos and codirect the film performances. In the process, they arrive at a sometimes devastating, sometimes tender series of epiphanies about their youthful selves, their motivations and misunderstandings, and the directions their lives have taken since. This process also entangles the next generation of young people in a pivotal experience of their own, which is the making of the film itself, as we see when the young actor playing teenage Makhmalbaf, about to play the scene in which he stabs his fellow young actor playing the policeman, breaks down sobbing in despair at having to do it.

Another landmark Iranian “docufiction” film is a collaboration between the two most celebrated directors associated with the Iranian New Wave. Close-Up (1990) was directed by Abbas Kiarostami and features Makhmalbaf playing himself. It’s about a strange series of events involving a fan of Makhmalbaf’s who got arrested for impersonating him.

Kiarostami filmed certain sequences as they actually occurred, such as the trial of the fan, Hossain Sabzian, an impoverished working-class family man with dreams of becoming a filmmaker. Sabzian also plays himself in dramatized sequences, such as those depicting how he persuaded an affluent family that he was Makhmalbaf, interested in filming a documentary about them inside their gated home.

Sabzian is caught and imprisoned, charged with fraud and attempted fraud by the indignant family. When contacted about the attempted theft of his identity, Makhmalbaf expresses nothing but compassion for Sabzian’s plight. Joining forces with Kiarostami, who’s filming, he meets Sabzian in prison, and Sabzian — who had no prior history of criminality — explains that he was driven by his love of cinema, especially the films of Makhmalbaf, which make him feel that Makhmalbaf understands his own suffering.

Makhmalbaf helps get Sabzian released. They negotiate a meeting between Sabzian and the affluent family. Makhmalbaf drives Sabzian to the family’s house after aiding him in choosing an enormous potted flower as a gesture of atonement. In the film’s most famous image, Sabzian carries the unwieldy flowerpot while riding on the back of Makhmalbaf’s scooter as they zoom through heavy Tehran traffic, all filmed by Kiarostami and his crew from a trailing van in grainy erratic footage, the sound periodically dropping out.

The final moment between Sabzian and the family at the gate of their home is heartrending. But the scene that really breaks me is when the Makhmalbaf assures Sabzian that he bears him no ill will for temporarily usurping his identity. This is because Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami respect his passion for filmmaking and consider him “a fellow filmmaker.” Hearing this, Sabzian bursts into tears, embraced by Makhmalbaf.

Just these few descriptions of key Iranian New Wave films illustrate how rare, wise, and humane a cinema arose from the culture now threatened by war. Our hearts go out to the great Iranian filmmakers struggling to preserve and pursue their art, and we long for reports that Jafar Panahi is alive, well, and still free, somewhere in Iran.