The Iranian New Wave

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ON THE OPENING night of the 1995 Telluride Film Festival, famed German director Werner Herzog declared, 'What I say tonight will be a banality in the future. The greatest films of the world today are being made in Iran.' Almost a decade later, Herzog's words ring true. Iran, along with Taiwan and Denmark, is widely regarded by film aficionados and international film critics alike as creating many of the best movies around.

At a time when Hollywood's global domination shapes moviemaking in most countries (most blockbuster-action films like Spiderman and T3 take in more money overseas than they do in the United States), Iran, a member in good standing of President Bush's Axis of Evil, is in the midst of a cinematic Golden Age. Like Italian Neo-Realism or Denmark's celebrated Dogme 95 movement, Iranian films eschew flashy special effects and gimmicky plot lines in favor of simple, straightforward narratives and a minimalist aesthetic in which natural elements like water, wind, and dust take on poetic resonance.

That's why it's infuriating, even heartbreaking, that several renowned Iranian directors, including Abbas Kiarostami, Bahman Ghobadi, and Jafar Panahi, have recently been refused visas to enter the United States. 'For years, I've been appalled at the treatment of all Iranians entering the United States, who routinely get fingerprinted,' writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in an open letter protesting the treatment of Iranian artists both in the U.S. and abroad. 'It shows a lack of interest and even contempt of some Americans towards other cultures.' For his part, Ghobadi, who was to be feted at the Chicago International Film Festival last October, forwarded his prize to Dubya himself.

The irony of the visa refusals is especially pointed, writes Noy Thrupkaew in The American Prospect (June 2003), since recent films, including Kiarostami's Ten, Ghobadi's Marooned in Iraq, and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's Under the Skin of the City, have not only upped the political ante in Iranian filmmaking, but also 'deliver the very criticisms one might think the U.S. administration would be eager to hear-particularly from an Iranian people whose struggle for democracy our president claims to support.'

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