5 Essential Iranian Films You Must Watch, From ‘Close-Up’ to ‘Holy Spider’

Close-Up (1990)

Cinema begins when the camera stops. Life blooms in the pause, in ourselves: the ones performing, the ones aching to be seen, to be heard. Perhaps that is why Close-up stands as Abbas Kiarostami’s most potent work, as it is about us. Hossain Sabzian steps into a wealthy household, posing as a celebrated director, claiming to make a film. Through him, Kiarostami keeps on playing with the form. It’s a re-enactment of a re-enactment, floating in that liminal space between capture and performance. It is never fully fiction, never wholly reality. No wonder it is called Close-up. We are all searching for someone to look at us closely, carefully, completely.

Salaam Cinema (1995)

It very well feels like a companion to Kiarostami’s Close-up, yet it pushes the discourse forward. Its premise is simple, electric. Director Mohsen Makhmalbaf places an ad for an open casting, hundreds arrive, and he turns the camera on them, on the auditions themselves, discovering stories he hadn’t expected. In a way the film is about those least likely to appear on the big screen, yet who have remade themselves through it. Makhmalbaf amps up the complexity with nice little touches like a Paul Newman look-alike who has never seen Paul Newman; or a woman who says, “I chose art for its humanity.” After all, cinema enchants us where art meets the human soul.

A still from Salaam Cinema (1995)

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Holy Spider (2022)

The serial killer story seems exhausted, but Ali Abbasi turns it inside out in this Danish-Swedish-French-German co-production. On the surface: a female journalist descends into Mashhad’s shadowed streets, tracking the so-called “Spider Killer” who preys on sex workers. Yet the film’s focus is not the killer himself. He is incidental, or rather, a lens to expose the city’s moral rot, the misogyny threaded into its veins, the decay that allows men to wear righteousness like armour. It reads like an origin story for the rage-driven, self-styled moral crusaders of our age. And as it moves forward, the horror is not only in the killings but in the reflection of us, in what society permits to fester.

A still from Holy Spider (2022)

Offside (2006)

Jafar Panahi works miracles with non-actors, and Offside is proof at its finest. A group of women, barred from a 2006 World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain, are corralled into a pen outside Azadi Stadium. Occasionally funny, sporadically tragic, Panahi’s gaze is fixed, not necessarily on the match, but on the walls that confine them, on the state that enforces these rules. The game of football hardly matters after a point. And true patriotism, Panahi suggests, emerges from persistence in the face of endless barriers. It is then that we glimpse humanity, after all, what better leveller than a game on the field?

A still from Offside (2006)

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Ten (2002)

Like Ray’s love for trains, Abbas Kiarostami loved car rides. It is only fitting, then, that he made a film, moving between fiction and non-fiction, which is about ten conversations between a woman driver and her passengers. The heart of the film is in the car with her son, where we glimpse how patriarchy is insidious, inherited. But the other conversations are equally arresting: a sex worker who speaks of her hatred for society and religion; a passenger who tries to persuade her to embrace faith. Just like life, the car keeps moving; we are left to make sense of it all: to draw meaning from the ordinary, the intimate.

A still from Ten (2002)