The Unseen Work of One of Iran’s Greatest Filmmakers

Since 2012, only one country has won the Oscar for Best International Feature twice: Iran. The achievement is all the more remarkable for the stringent censorship that filmmakers in the Islamic Republic face and also because, in this category, the Academy (unlike, say, the Golden Globes or the National Society of Film Critics) considers only official submissions from national film boards, one per country. This means that filmmakers out of favor with autocratic regimes—including, in Iran, some of the nation’s greatest artists—don’t stand a chance, and some of the most notable recent Iranian films have been submitted by other countries. One of this year’s nominees, “It Was Just an Accident,” by the dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi, was the entrant for France, where several of its co-producers are based; Panahi, who has been imprisoned for his activism and was banned from filmmaking in 2010, has since shot his films clandestinely. In 2024, another director, Mohammad Rasoulof, fled to Germany after being sentenced to a flogging and eight years in prison; the final film he made before leaving, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” received an Oscar nomination last year, having been submitted by Germany. Yet, like the Academy, the movie business at large has its blind spots; some of Iran’s best films remain unrecognized in the United States. At New York’s Iranian Film Festival, which was held three times between 2019 and 2025, I saw two films by the director Mani Haghighi—“Pig” (2018) and “Subtraction” (2022)—and reviewed both enthusiastically. Few critics have had the chance to agree: “Pig” had only a nominal U.S. release, and “Subtraction” is still unreleased here. Yet both movies are worthy of mention alongside anything released during that time, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call Haghighi’s 2016 feature “A Dragon Arrives!” one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century. It played in a handful of American film festivals in 2016 and 2017 but has never been in theatrical release or available on streaming here. For those in the U.S., appreciating Haghighi’s œuvre currently involves trawling the web for bootlegs, but the more of his work I’ve watched, the more convinced I am that he is one of the world’s most interesting and most woefully underrated filmmakers. Iranian movies have been among the treasures of world cinema long before the Oscars deigned to take notice, of course, and also before the Islamic Revolution installed the current regime, in 1979. Haghighi’s films, like those of his distinguished peers, emerge from a grand tradition that goes back more than sixty years, to the days of the Shah, who, in 1953, consolidated his despotic rule over the country in a coup backed by the U.S. and Britain. The Shah’s Western orientation extended to culture, and a wide range of artistically important international films could be seen in Tehran, in time including those of the French New Wave. During the political and artistic ferment of the nineteen-sixties, Iran was one of many countries that developed a homegrown New Wave. Iranian cinema came to international attention with a short documentary about a leper colony, “The House Is Black” (1962), directed by one of Iran’s most revered modern poets, Forugh Farrokhzad, which won a prize at West Germany’s Oberhausen festival; Ebrahim Golestan’s 1965 feature, “Brick and Mirror,” which was acclaimed in Cahiers du Cinéma, the crucible and house organ of the French New Wave; and Dariush Mehrjui’s “The Cow,” from 1969, which won a major award at the Venice Film Festival and is often cited as the first film of the Iranian New Wave. In 1969, a local event proved even more cinematically consequential than international recognition: an organization called Kanoon, dedicated to children’s culture, appointed a young graphic artist named Abbas Kiarostami to launch a film division. He made playfully inventive educational shorts, soon expanding his scope to features exploring the lives of both children and adults, often with an ambiguous blend of documentary and fiction. Such films as “Close-Up” (1990) and “And Life Goes On” (1992)—the first Iranian film to be shown at the New York Film Festival—established his worldwide reputation as one of the cinematic masters of symbolism, metaphor, allegory, and irony. In 1997, his film “Taste of Cherry” was a co-winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Kiarostami’s work, and the prominence it brought to Iranian cinema, energized younger directors and gave them a platform. Panahi, who began his career as Kiarostami’s assistant, made his first feature in 1995, and the first years of the twenty-first century saw the débuts of Rasoulof and of Asghar Farhadi, whose later films “A Separation” (2011) and “The Salesman” (2016) brought Iran its two Best International Feature Oscars. Haghighi, born in 1969, is a contemporary of Rasoulof and Farhadi and, like Panahi, worked with Kiarostami early in his career. But the great heritage of Iranian cinema is, for Haghighi, more than an influence: it’s a family affair. Haghighi’s father, Nemat, was a cinematographer, and his mother, the gallerist and translator Lili Golestan, is the daughter of the New Wave trailblazer Ebrahim Golestan. Haghighi went to university in Canada, studying philosophy, before returning to Tehran to begin his film career, making documentaries and commercials; his first two features, “Abadan” (2003) and “Men at Work” (2006), were shot cheaply, in small-format digital video. The latter, a wry comedy of futile endeavor, was based on a story by Kiarostami, but Haghighi soon sought to shake off Kiarostami’s influence—and, even more, a prevailing caricature of Iranian cinema that Kiarostami’s style had given rise to. Kiarostami had made films mostly with nonprofessional actors, often about rural people of modest means. As early as 2003, Haghighi said, “There has been a pressure to emulate that Kiarostami touch, which, of course, is impossible.” When “Pig” was released, he was quoted as saying, “I still love many of these films, but I feel a little crushed by the weight of their heritage on the Iranian cinema.” After his first feature, Haghighi suggested to Farhadi that they team up and break with this tradition, working with professional actors in stories about their own milieu—the urban middle class. Their first collaboration, “Fireworks Wednesday” (2006), which they co-wrote and which Farhadi directed, was a success. Another, “About Elly” (2009), won international acclaim; again, Farhadi directed, and this time Haghighi co-starred, also pitching in on the script, uncredited. (Rachel Aviv has detailed, in this magazine, the pair’s stressful partnership.) Steeped in international cinema, Haghighi has since taken familiar tropes, forms, and genres and bent them in new directions. His two most recent films, “Pig” and “Subtraction”—the first of his that I saw—are so different that I doubt whether a viewer who didn’t know would guess they were by the same director. “Subtraction” is a descendant of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, a taut thriller about a Tehran couple who find that another couple in the city are their doppelgängers and who, in attempting to unravel the mystery, get entangled in the other family’s life. “Pig” is a playfully anarchic yet gory comedy about a Tehran-based filmmaker named Hasan who has been banned from making films. While he’s earning a living directing commercials, directors who are still making features are being targeted in murderous attacks in which their foreheads are carved with the Persian word for “pig.” Hasan frets that his reputation is insufficient to make him a target; instead, he becomes a suspect, after a rival director is killed. Haghighi’s “Canaan” (2008), a bourgeois melodrama based on an Alice Munro story, was another collaboration with Farhadi, who was a co-writer. Here, after his ultra-low-budget earlier films, Haghighi discovered the emotional power of the precision that he could achieve with professional resources at his disposal. The film also showed an important difference between his approach and Farhadi’s. Where Farhadi concentrates on the script and the actors via images that are largely transparent and neutral, Haghighi truly thinks with the camera. The movie teems with closeups, from which he derives an extraordinary variety of moods and compositions; actors’ frozen gazes, seen in fixed framings, suggest the inner life in action. His next film, “Modest Reception” (2012), was another exercise in bending genre, albeit a genre of recent vintage—that of Kiarostami’s many road movies. Its personal significance is trumpeted by the fact that Haghighi plays one of the two lead roles, a man named Kaveh who is being driven by a woman, Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti), to a remote, wintry mountain region. The film begins with the pair in their car, a squabble already in progress as they reach a police checkpoint, where the dispute becomes so heated that they risk arrest. They find an odd way out of the jam—opening the trunk, grabbing plastic bags filled with cash, and throwing them at the officer, who overcomes his bewilderment to gather the loot as the pair drive off. It turns out that the duo have undertaken their rustic journey with the aim of divesting themselves of two hundred bags of cash—to distribute huge, life-changing jackpots to individuals throughout the area, and to record the handovers in photos and videos. The random recipients are naturally suspicious: How can these weird benefactors be on the level? Leila and Kaveh improvise their way through each encounter. In effect, they’re an itinerant theatre troupe of two, concocting ever more eccentric, reckless scenarios to coax or fool or frighten their audience into taking the money. Sometimes they present themselves as a couple, sometimes as siblings, and their schemes involve manipulation, cruelty, and destruction; they set brother against brother, tear down a peddler’s stall, and disrupt a burial. Haghighi’s robust and outgoing manner usually makes him an appealing onscreen presence, but here his glib bonhomie is diabolical. The pair are chaos agents who, in conferring the benefit of sudden wealth, lure the recipients into corruption. (The story also winks at Golestan’s last film, “Secrets of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley,” from 1974, in which a farmer’s discovery of buried treasure corrupts him and his neighbors.) Chronicling an obsession that leads to calamity, “Modest Reception” leaps out of its realistic style and into the realm of the irrational and the symbolic, pointing the way toward the dizzying layering of the masterpiece of Haghighi’s career so far, “A Dragon Arrives!” “A Dragon Arrives!” expands a simple premise—the investigation into the death of a political prisoner under the Shah’s regime—into a pan-historical jamboree, a breathtakingly imaginative abundance of narrative strands, a thrilling, revelatory complex of adventures and ideas that is also a compendium of Haghighi’s themes, styles, and ideals. The story is principally set early in 1965, on the stark desert island of Qeshm, in the Strait of Hormuz. A youthful plainclothes detective named Babak (Amir Jadidi) arrives to investigate the death of a man who’d been living there in internal exile, in the shored-up hull of a beached seventeenth-century ship. The death looks like suicide, but Babak suspects murder. After Babak has the victim buried, a superstitious local warns him that this will bring disaster and he must leave. He stays anyway, and a mysterious earthquake strikes the grave. Babak recruits two men from Tehran to help investigate: a geologist and a hippieish sound recordist for movies. Another officer stationed on the island—terse, formal, and frighteningly chilly—does his best to impede the investigation, but the three sleuths make an interesting discovery: the victim, despite his hermetic existence, was involved with a local woman, and, while they are there, she dies in childbirth. A member of the Shah’s terrifying secret police, the savak, turns up and interrogates the trio; though they risk arrest or worse, they’re loath to abandon the newborn. “A Dragon Arrives!” leaps among time frames with a deft assertiveness that’s both clear and suspenseful. Recordings of the three men being interrogated provide the basis for flashbacks, and scenes set in Tehran’s artistic beau monde of the late sixties show the aftermath of their adventures. (The film delights in the period styles of fashion, equipment, cars; an orange Chevy Impala is practically a character.) Haghighi also launches the story back beyond the Shah’s regime into earlier eras of Persian culture and into the history of Qeshm itself, where the English explorer William Baffin was killed in 1622. Inspired in part by Roberto Bolaño’s novel “The Savage Detectives,” these strands are explored through a polyphony of voices; the present day is brought to life by way of documentary-style interviews with real-life people telling ostensibly true stories. As playful as the movie is, its central tale of persecution and resistance plays not like an allegory but like a communion, a linking of the times—the inspiration of conscience by the revelation of past heroism, political and artistic. The film’s fanatical attention to detail, whether in the rugged and remote island’s metaphysical conundrums or the labyrinthine logic of the investigation, is more than a matter of style; it’s at the core of the movie’s political morality. The plot pivots on tiny gestures involving matters of life and death. It would be cruel to divulge the details, but, after a scene of climactic violence, Haghighi delivers one of the most exalted point-of-view shots I’ve ever seen, of a sunrise, discerned beyond the banal edge of a car door, that’s one of the cinema’s most serene and glorious affirmations of being alive. Haghighi’s tale of three men and a newborn hints at John Ford’s “3 Godfathers,” but its true cinematic forebear is his grandfather Golestan’s “Brick and Mirror,” which is about a Tehran taxi-driver named Hashem who is left with a baby after a passenger abandons it in his back seat. The connection between the films goes far beyond the presence of a foundling. The sound-recordist character in “A Dragon Arrives!” has supposedly worked on Golestan’s movie, and in some of the documentary-style scenes Haghighi discusses “Brick and Mirror,” illustrating his points with clips from it. He even claims that his own film originated in a chance exploration of Golestan’s archives and elaborates this fanciful tale with more faux interviews, including one with his (actual) mother. Even Haghighi’s daring sense of form—his cornucopia of tones, styles, and genres—reflects his grandfather’s masterwork and suggests an expansion of Golestan’s audacious and original aesthetic. Before Golestan directed films, he was a writer, translator, and photographer, and his wide-ranging artistic experience is evident in “Brick and Mirror” in a multiplicity of tones, moods, and subjects—a variousness that frees this straightforwardly realistic tale from dramatic convention. He subtly anatomizes the Iranian society of his day with a nightmarish vision of poverty in the area where the baby is abandoned; loose talk at a night club where Hashem seeks guidance from his friends but receives conflicting advice; bureaucratic intransigence at a police station and a maternity ward; and a bravura half-hour sequence, in Hashem’s apartment, of romance and negotiation with his girlfriend, Taji. Above all, there is a remarkable scene in which Taji, who wants him to adopt the child and raise it with her, visits an orphanage. This documentary-like episode, which would be a noteworthy short film in itself, is also a point of contact with that other harbinger of the Iranian New Wave, Forugh Farrokhzad’s leper-colony documentary, “The House Is Black.” In 1958, Golestan, having just opened his own studio, hired Farrokhzad, who was already well known for boldly candid love poetry, as an assistant. They soon became lovers, and their relationship—he was married, she was divorced—was the talk of literary Iran. When Farrokhzad decided to make her documentary, Golestan produced it. The finished film features voice-overs by both of them—Golestan’s informational, Farrokhzad’s lyrical. The couple stayed together until Farrokhzad’s untimely death, in a car crash, in 1967. The directness with which the camera meets the eyes of the film’s subjects suggests compassion for their disfigurement and isolation (indeed, Farrokhzad adopted a boy from the colony), but there are no interviews. Farrokhzad’s context is less social than cosmic. This is a kind of existential documentary, in which psychology is elided in favor of a confrontation with concealed, unbearable truths and with a form of cruel beauty that defies social norms. Farrokhzad’s camera is unsparing and tender as it surveys the faces and limbs of the afflicted and reportorially curious in its view of the colony’s medical, educational, and recreational activities. Numinous plein-air compositions, showing the patients around the institution’s grounds, assert the irresistible force of nature. That sense of freedom—of the gaze, of emotion, and of expression—is part of what made Farrokhzad the Iranian New Wave’s confrontational exemplar. She was a prime source of inspiration for Kiarostami, whose 1999 masterwork, “The Wind Will Carry Us,” borrowing its title from a poem of hers, is a tale of the natural powers of sex and death that are stronger than religious and political strictures. Haghighi, in setting “A Dragon Arrives!” in the mid-sixties, soon after Farrokhzad’s and Golestan’s classic films were made, historicizes his portrayal of a brutal police state. But his harking back to the early years of the film tradition in which he and his contemporaries still work has other resonances, too, revealing contemporary Iran’s indelible connections to the culture of the pre-Revolutionary era. For Haghighi, the ongoing effort to explore long-sealed mysteries and reveal hidden byways of history—the quest for truth in the face of a regime that suppresses it—is, for all its dangers and difficulties, a joyful act of liberation. When “A Dragon Arrives!” was released in France, in 2017, Haghighi was asked how he hoped it would be received. He spoke of the “very particular expectations from everyone in France or Europe” for films from his country: “Because of Kiarostami, everyone expected simplicity from Iranian cinema. Because of Panahi, a critical and social approach. And the same for Farhadi: a social cinema, a linear narrative.” He sought to show “a more complex aspect,” even as he rightly deemed his film “completely political.” He achieved his goal artistically, but his movies have yet to be widely recognized as a distinctive cinematic universe; perhaps their variety of genres and tones has been an impediment for critics, programmers, and other gatekeepers. His themes intersect with those of Kiarostami—an anti-authoritarianism that, though no less radical, is an ironic, self-deprecating one. Haghighi has taken a stand against censorship and repression not only in his movies but also by personal example. In 2022, he was among the signers of an open letter denouncing police violence against protesters, which was posted on social media by Rasoulof and another Iranian director, Mostafa al-Ahmad. After the pair were arrested, Haghighi also co-signed a letter of protest—as did Panahi, who, in turn, was arrested and imprisoned. The international film community—including the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice festivals and the American Cinematheque—spoke out against these persecutions. On September 13, 2022, in Tehran, a young woman named Mahsa Amini was arrested on the ground that her hijab was too loose; after a beating by police, she went into a coma, and, on September 16th, she died. Protests arose throughout Iran; Haghighi recorded a video in support of the protesters. In mid-October, Haghighi was at the Tehran airport and about to travel to the London Film Festival to present “Subtraction,” but he was prevented from boarding his flight and his passport was confiscated. Interviewed soon thereafter, Haghighi continued to criticize Iran’s government—but he also felt that cinematic allies worldwide, with their statements of support, were exerting their energies in the wrong direction: “The only thing they accomplish is to give the international film community the false sense that they ‘played a small role’ in helping us.” Haghighi’s perspective was institutional and involved practical, decisive official action from the mainstream of world cinema: “Real support takes place when the Oscar Academy stops asking government bodies to nominate films for the best foreign-film category.” He added, “Gestures are useless.” ♦