101 Films of Ale: Iran

The first 33 films are ranked; the rest are listed in chronological order. I have made a separate (much shorter) list of "Persian diaspora" cinema which consists of works produced outside the country by Iranian filmmakers.

I fell in love with Iranian cinema in the early-to-mid 1990s, after seeing Panahi's The White Balloon and several films from Kiarostami; I was lucky enough to be living in Chicago, which had an enthusiastic critic (Jonathan Rosenbaum) who was an early champion of this culture's cinema, and an institution (The Film Center of the Art Institute) that held an Iranian film festival every autumn for several years. And my interest has continued to this day, and I'm pleased to see that Iranian cinema has had an ever-greater presence on the world stage.

Westerners, especially my American countrymen, who don't know Iranian cinema or Persian culture in general would probably be surprised that it is not a cinema and culture primarily concerned with denigrating and attacking America and Israel and the west in general. While these elements are not entirely absent (just as anti-Muslim and anti-Iranian sentiment is hardly absent in our western world), you will find that in most of the Iranian films that are present on my list and indeed in most that find their way to film festivals and cinemas, that overt political statements - of any kind - are hardly a primary impulse. Rosenbaum once called Iranian cinema "the most ethical" in the world; while this strikes me as needlessly hyperbolic and impossible to prove, I do think it's fair to say that few if any national cinemas over the last 30 years have been more concerned with ethical issues. If you want a cinema that really attempts to explore some of the basic elements of the human condition in responsible ways without kowtowing to adolescent tastes, the Iranian cinema is as good a place as any to explore.

This is not to say that Iranian cinema consists entirely of humanist dramas or psychological explorations of what it means to live in the world, but this wonderful and rare (if not unique) cinema derives largely from the unfortunate fact that the revolution at the end of the 1970s severely limited the subjects which filmmakers were able to tackle, and censored much of what we take for granted in the western world (i.e, sex and violence). You won't see any teen sex comedies here - but neither will you see shoot 'em ups. The period before 1980 does offer a bit wider range of material, and Iranian filmmakers like their peers in France (probably the country that most influenced the development of Iranian cinema), Germany, or America were trying to make more "adult" films dealing with once-taboo themes. Alas most of the 1960s-70s films are very difficult to find, and typically can only be seen in very poor condition. But these films do still exist, and we can hope that the still-increasing attention this great national cinema is getting will eventually lead to the unearthing of more of these buried treasures.