How do you tell a story when you cannot show everything? How do you talk about love, poverty, loneliness, women, politics, identity, or even death when there are rules around what can and cannot appear on screen?
Iranian cinema has had to answer these questions for decades. And somehow, instead of allowing these restrictions to silence them, they found another way of speaking.
But it would be wrong to say that censorship is what created Iranian cinema’s subtlety. The roots of this style existed even before the 1979 Revolution. What changed after the Revolution was the extent to which filmmakers had to rely on suggestion, metaphor, symbolism, silence, and what could be communicated without being shown directly.
A film does not always have to show us everything for us to understand what is happening. Sometimes, it is what the filmmaker chooses not to show that makes us look closer.
The beginnings of this approach can be seen in Iranian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Much of mainstream Iranian cinema at the time was commercial and escapist, but a group of filmmakers were beginning to move away from that. Their films focused on ordinary people and everyday realities, including poverty, class, loneliness, and the difficulties of simply trying to live.
One of the most important films from this period was Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969).
The film follows Hassan, a poor villager whose only cow is also his only source of security. When the cow dies, Hassan cannot accept the loss and gradually begins believing that he himself has become the cow. On paper, it sounds like a strange story. But underneath it is a much larger one about poverty, class inequality, economic dependence, and what happens when a person loses the one thing that gives his life meaning.
The cow itself therefore becomes more than just a cow. It becomes a symbol. And this use of ordinary things to represent something much larger would become an important part of Iranian cinema. A filmmaker could talk about poverty without turning the film into a lecture about poverty. The story could remain simple while the meaning underneath it became much more complicated.
The film became an important part of what would later be known as the Iranian New Wave because it moved away from the escapism of commercial cinema and found something larger in an ordinary person’s life. And this idea of finding something larger in something ordinary would continue to define Iranian cinema.
Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black (1962), for instance, is a poetic documentary about a leper colony. It looks at suffering and isolation, but does not turn its subjects into spectacles. Instead, it observes their everyday existence and allows the images, poetry, and silences to speak for themselves. Sohrab Shahid-Saless’ Still Life (1974) takes this even further. The film follows an elderly railway worker whose life is almost entirely defined by routine. There are no dramatic twists trying to force emotion out of the audience. There is just a man, his work, his loneliness, and the slow passing of time. And that becomes enough to talk about ageing, dignity, and the human need to feel that one’s life still has meaning.
So the idea of saying more with less was already there.
Then came the 1979 Revolution. The new regulations placed much greater restrictions on what could be shown in Iranian cinema. Political and social criticism could not always be expressed openly. Romantic relationships and physical intimacy were restricted, while women’s clothing, behaviour, and interactions on screen were also regulated.
This obviously created a difficult situation for filmmakers. But the film industry did not stop. It adapted.
If something could not be shown, it could be suggested. This is where symbolism became particularly significant. An object, a journey, a house, a road, or even a child could begin carrying meanings beyond what they literally meant. That is why films that appear simple on the surface can often carry much more under its veil.
Take Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987). The story is about a young boy who accidentally takes his friend’s notebook home. He knows his friend could be punished for not having it, so he sets out to return it.
That is the story. A child looking for another child’s house. But through that small journey, Kiarostami begins exploring friendship, responsibility, obedience, and moral duty. The film does not at any point feel empty because of the absence of a dramatic speech explaining any of these things. The boy simply keeps walking, asking questions, and trying to do what he believes is right.
The film trusts the audience to understand what is hidden behind the guise of the story on the surface, and what the film is truly trying to convey.
This is also why children became such important figures in Iranian cinema. Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997) is a perfect example. The film revolves around something as ordinary as a pair of lost shoes. Ali loses his sister’s shoes, and because his family cannot afford another pair, the two children have to share his pair.
It is a very small problem. But that pair of shoes becomes a way of showing poverty, family, love, responsibility, and even the embarrassment that comes with not having enough. The shoes are not just shoes anymore. They become a symbol of everything the children cannot afford to say.
This is something that can feel surprisingly familiar to an Indian viewer as well. Indian cinema has also often relied on objects, songs, locations, and everyday situations to communicate feelings that characters may not directly express. A train, a house, a piece of clothing, a photograph, or even a meal can carry emotional meaning beyond itself.
The difference is that Iranian filmmakers developed this language under much stricter limitations, and over time it became one of the most distinctive voices of their cinema. Iranian cinema does not always feel the need to tell us what to think.
Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) does something similar. Much of the film is built around sparse conversations, natural surroundings, and things that happen outside the frame. Sometimes we hear somebody speaking without even seeing them. Sometimes a character waits. Sometimes nothing appears to happen for a while. But silence here is not empty. It has meaning. A pause can tell us something. A look can tell us something. Even the absence of a character can tell us something.
This is where the influence of Persian culture becomes important too. Iranian storytelling has a much older relationship with poetry, metaphor, and suggestion. Persian poets such as Hafez, Rumi, and Saadi often used metaphor and layered meanings to express ideas that were not always stated directly. Iranian cinema inherited some of that cultural memory, where interpretation is not something separate from the experience of watching a work.
This is also why simply copying the surface of Iranian cinema would never really make another country’s cinema Iranian. Removing music, making a film slower, using a child, or having somebody walk through a village does not automatically create the same kind of cinema. Because the distinctive voice comes from somewhere deeper. It comes from the culture, the history, the way of looking at people, and the way stories have traditionally been told.
So censorship did not invent this language. It simply made filmmakers depend on it even more.
And it is important not to romanticise that. Restrictions on filmmakers are still restrictions. The fact that artists found creative ways around them does not make censorship a positive initiative. If anything, the creativity of Iranian filmmakers shows how much they were able to do despite those limitations.
Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (2000) is one such example. The film follows several Iranian women whose stories are connected by the legal and social restrictions placed upon them. Its circular structure reflects the feeling that these women keep moving from one limitation into another, without ever really being allowed to escape the system surrounding them.
Rakhshān Banietemad also explored women’s lives through intimate stories rather than making them feel like abstract political subjects. The Blue-Veiled (1995), for instance, looks at a relationship shaped by class and social expectations, while Under the Skin of the City (2001) focuses on the pressures faced by an ordinary Iranian family, especially its women. The social commentary is there. It just does not always arrive as a preaching sermon.
And then comes Asghar Farhadi. In A Separation (2011), Farhadi takes the idea of indirect storytelling into the lives of an ordinary family going through a divorce. What begins as a personal conflict slowly becomes a much larger examination of class, tradition, modernity, responsibility, truth, and social duty.
What makes the film so effective is that nobody is entirely right or entirely wrong. Farhadi does not tell us who deserves our sympathy. He makes us move between perspectives until the question itself becomes elusive. And this is another quality that makes Iranian cinema different. The films do not always tell us what the answer is because they are often more interested in making us sit with the question. That is also why the minimalist style of Iranian cinema cannot be reduced to having fewer locations, fewer characters or less dialogue. It is a way of looking.
The audience is urged to widen their horizons, just as the filmmaker did while making the film, and notice things they would normally overlook.
Simple moments can carry an entire story. And maybe that is why Iranian cinema learnt to share its stories without showing everything.
It did not have the privilege of always saying things directly. But it also came from a culture that already understood the power of poetry, metaphor, and suggestion. The filmmakers who worked within these conditions therefore found ways to turn limitation into language without allowing the limitation itself to become the story.
The world may not always see what is outside the frame. But the characters do. And the audience eventually does too.
A story does not become smaller because something is left unseen. Sometimes, it becomes larger because of it.