Leaking truth to power: Iranian filmmakers navigate and defy restrictions

The history of Iranian directors smuggling secretly shot films out of the country is longer than many of us think. In the mid 1970s, Marva Nabili, the second woman ever to direct a fiction feature in Iran, snuck the negatives of The Sealed Soil in a suitcase into the United States. About a village girl who vehemently refuses to marry, her film touched on the disruption modernity caused when it first knocked on rural doors — one of several reasons why the ruling Shah was losing favour in his country then.  

Nabili was part of the first new wave of Iranian cinema, much less discussed than its post-Revolutionary counterpart – the second wave, led by the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. She did not take government permission to make her almost-Brechtian feature. Instead, she used her credentials as a state-funded telefilm director to get away with recording in villages where officials generally barred access. Nostalgists like to present the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, as a permissive era, but historians frequently describe the restrictions of that period as draconian.  

Just years earlier, first-wave pioneer Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969) was prevented from releasing because authorities felt its portrayal of rural poverty would make them look bad. It was covertly transported to film festivals, first Cannes and later Venice, where it won critical acclaim. The release of Mehrjui’s next, The Cycle (1975), was also obstructed for multiple years, this time for showing urban corruption in hospitals. Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s wife, interestingly helped lift the ban and screened the film at a festival in Shiraz.  

“What the old can see in a mudbrick, youth can see in a mirror” — this mystifying line, which inspired Ebrahim Golestan (another oft-censored filmmaker) to name his 1964 feature Brick and Mirror, comes from the Sufi poet Attar (1142-1220). For generations old and young, the work of seeing is a constant here. In that sense, the line provides an allegory for Iran’s socially conscious filmmakers who, across past and recent decades, have sought to see the world around them.  

Censorship remains a favourite tool of totalitarian leaders, and circumvention is the reflex it keeps on producing in filmmakers. After the Pahlavi era, leaders of the Islamic Republic made it mandatory for scripts, casts, and crews to be approved in advance, and for a representative of the ministry to be present during shooting. The Iranian revolution, which was brought about with the help of many groups, began devouring its own: The new government targeted students and intellectuals through a cultural revolution.  

That confusion and disappointment is best captured in Tahmineh Milani’s The Hidden Half, made two decades later, in 2001. In flashbacks, the protagonist reveals a past she had stashed away after the revolution, when students involved with communist groups were persecuted. The film got Milani arrested; the Islamic Revolutionary Court charged her with counterrevolutionary intent, among other things. In an interview, she explained the loss of identity subsequent generations of Iranians have suffered: Our kids today don’t know themselves, don’t know their parents, have lost their dreams and are confused. 

But as restrictions grow more severe, protest filmmakers have grown more resilient. Previously, filmmakers such as Kiarostami resisted by filming mostly outdoors or with children to avoid rules that required female actors to wear hijabs even in private spaces. Others, like Asghar Farhadi, sought government permissions but engaged in oblique criticism of institutions.  Increasingly, filmmakers defy by working underground. For example, Panahi made It was Just an Accident (2025) and Mahnaz Mohammadi made Roya (2026) in secret, even after living through government interrogations, arrests, and bans.  

Unlike their predecessors, young Iranians are not okay with living dual lives. Directors Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz shared that insight with me this January, after a screening of The Friend’s House is Here (2026). Shot clandestinely in Tehran and featuring women without headscarves in public, their film celebrates the rebellious spirit of an emerging generation of artists. They completed the feature even as bombs dropped on the country during last year’s Twelve Day War, and smuggled it into the Sundance Film Festival amid this year’s nationwide protests in Iran.  

As another illegal war unfolds, no matter which way ground realities shift, Iran’s dissident filmmakers can be trusted to make and leak films that punch up.

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A weekly column devoted to subjects such as art, dance, music, film, sport, and science.  Ranjita Ganesan is a Mumbai-based writer