Cinema has been a part of Iran for nearly its entire history. Though the work of Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi is no longer extant—he who, as the official photographer of Muzaffar al-Din Shah, shot the country’s earliest known footage on a camera obtained from Paris in 1900—his story speaks to the state’s enduring influence on its imagery.

In particular, Iran’s cinematic identity over the past century has been characterized by the contestation of hegemonic forces, both secular and fundamentalist. In the first New Wave that took shape in the 1960s, a generation of filmmakers developed innovative methods for poetically evoking the pervasive sense of societal decay under the rule of Reza Pahlavi. That work would continue following Pahlavi’s exile in 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), as any promises of democratic pluralism were largely left by the wayside.

So what can we glean from Iran’s films and filmmakers now, amid the civilian uprisings that threaten to topple the current regime? It’s foolhardy—at times, even outright dangerous—to look at any collection of films as a faithful account of Iran’s complex cultural or political history. But given the country’s seemingly innate knack for self-interrogation through image-making, the cinema of Iran often yields a stirring humanism, one that rebukes the rhetoric of neoconservative war hawks abroad and fundamentalist patriarchs within.

Here are six films that broadly trace the arc from the twilight of the Qajar dynasty to the volatile tumult of the present.

Chess of the Wind (1976)

Mohammad Reza Aslani’s 1976 masterpiece, rediscovered after languishing in obscurity for decades (the director’s son famously stumbled upon the negatives in a flea market), places its Gothic tale in the liminal space between the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties. This slipperiness isn’t readily apparent as the film follows the machinations of Lady Aghdas (Fakhri Khorvash) and her maid (Shoreh Aghdashloo) to wrest control of her mother’s estate from her loutish stepfather (Mohamad Ali Keshavarz) and his conniving nephews.

Yet the allusions to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 are instrumental to Aslani’s philosophy of history as not merely a catalogue of the past, but a set of “deterministic principles.” The film was partially shot at the Moshir ad-Dowleh Mansion, where the Persian Constitution of 1906 was written—the document that effectively signaled the beginning of the modern era in Iran’s history, though subsequent years saw those initial steps toward democracy scuppered by the 1921 coup that installed Reza Khan as Iran’s leader. In a series of cutaways to washerwomen discussing the late matriarch, one conversation briefly references the conscription that was passed into law in 1925. This subtly foreshadows Aslani’s ending, which breaks out of the manicured dollhouse of his drama to linger on a panoramic shot of contemporary Tehran. More than a period piece, Chess of the Wind is a thesis on historical tumult as a continuum in Iran’s struggle against institutional corruption.

The Night It Rained (1967)

Kamran Shirdel made his mark as a documentary filmmaker whose critiques of the Pahlavi regime found their apex with this 1967 opus. Seizing on a news story about a young boy who stopped a train from derailing on a rainy night near the village of Gorgan, the film infuses its swift running time with various contradictory testimonies that challenge the veracity of the widely circulated story.

The Night It Rained never arrives at a definitive account of what happened on the night in question, compelling the viewer to scrutinize the figureheads of various institutions (the press, the school, the Governor-General of the Province) and their vested interests. Shirdel shot his film during the White Revolution, a series of agrarian reform policies enacted by the shah to distribute land more equitably, but that had the deleterious impact of forcing many farmers to emigrate from rural to urban spaces. The end of Pahlavi’s reign was marked by a mythopoeic tendency, culminating in an ill-fated commemoration of the 2,500 years of the Persian Empire that ignored the socioeconomic disparities his policies generated. Interrogating such storytelling, The Night It Rained operates as a thematically and formally incisive study of truth as an epistemological construct.

Iran, Utopia in the Making (1980)

The lone film in this list not directed by an Iranian filmmaker, Jocelyne Saab and Rafik Boustani’s Iran, Utopia in the Making is nevertheless an essential and electrifying snapshot of Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution. Using images of everyday life from Tehran to Qom, the film addresses the polarities within Iranian society, from Shiite funerals to Marxist rallies. Yet while it adopts a largely anthropological lens, Iran, Utopia in the Making doesn’t relegate the people of Iran to simplistic caricatures.

A key detail of note in the film is the inclusion of Kurdish freedom fighters, whose struggle for independence was curtailed by the clergy. Saab and Boustani contravene a hegemonic narrative that occludes the contribution of the Kurdish people to Iran’s independence, a topic that has gained newfound urgency and relevance since the Women, Life, Freedom movement spurred on by Kurdish women. With its expansive scope, Iran, Utopia in the Making remains a dynamic document of the political thought and praxis that shaped the last 45 years of the nation’s history.

Marriage of the Blessed (1989)

Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s incendiary 1989 film was released one year after the end of an eight-year war Iran waged against Iraq. Approximately 500,000 people were killed, and the psychological trauma of that war colors the febrile expressionism of Makhmalbaf’s portrait of a former war photographer (Mahmoud Hatamikia) suffering from PTSD.

Makhmalbaf’s unsparing vision of post-war Iranian society generated considerable controversy upon release, and its despairing view of the Revolution’s discarded and betrayed ideals marked a turning point in his filmmaking career. Just as importantly, Marriage of the Blessed is a howl of anguish that anticipated the coming decade’s call for liberal reforms, which saw brief yet ultimately unrealized potential in the 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami.

The Silent Majority Speaks (2010)

The Silent Majority Speaks is a harrowing chronicle of the protests that erupted in Iran following the contested results of the 2009 election, which reinstated the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Culled from footage secretly captured from the front lines of the protest, Bani Khoshnoudi’s documentary helps to place earlier uprisings and upheavals into context.

As Khoshnoudi’s interspersing of various eras of political struggle gradually accelerates into a furious montage of history as a violent continuum, what emerges is a film that charts a clear path through decades of conflict. Indeed, the vivid images of Green Movement protesters are chilling both for the carnage they capture and the implications of sustained, unseen brutality that remain unchecked. Clear-eyed and gripping, The Silent Majority Speaks is a film whose elegy for the lives lost in the margins of a brutal theocracy remains tragically evergreen.

It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Three years after Jina Mahsa Amini’s murder sparked the Women, Life, Freedom movement, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident taps into the vein of palpable dread that anticipated the most recent uprisings. Panahi’s first feature since his release from prison, the film follows a group, led by a mechanic (Vahid Mobasseri), seeking revenge against their shared, alleged torturer (Ebrahim Azzizi).

Panahi’s scenario makes numerous references to contemporary events like Women, Life, Freedom, as well as the effect Iran’s excursion into the Syrian Civil War had on the man Vahid kidnaps. While certain components of global policy, like the impact of US sanctions on Iran, go unmentioned, Panahi’s neorealist approach lucidly dramatizes a social schema sustained by pitting the victims of oppression against one another. His outlook ultimately reserves compassion for his characters, even as his caustic vision of retribution holds no illusions about an easy end to the cycle of violence perpetuated by the IRI.