Iran

24 Frames

Abbas Kiarostami’s final film, 24 Frames, comprises twenty-four uncut, static shots — each ninety seconds long — observing nature, animals, and thresholds between interior and exterior. Beginning with animated movement superimposed on Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, it proceeds into real-world stillness, testing how much meaning resides in time, attention, and unmediated presence. Released posthumously at Cannes 2017, it is a rigorous, unsentimental essay on perception and impermanence.

A Wedding Suit

A Wedding Suit (1976) is Abbas Kiarostami’s 54-minute comedy made for Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. A woman orders a suit for her son to wear to a wedding; her tailor’s apprentice and two friends secretly try it on overnight. Structured around quiet observation and precise, unhurried staging, the film finds humour and humanity in small-scale decisions, material detail, and the unspoken rhythms of adolescent collaboration. It contains no score, minimal dialogue, and no overt commentary — its concerns are procedural, spatial, and tactile.

Breaktime

Breaktime (1972) is Abbas Kiarostami’s fourteen-minute observational drama, shot during an actual school break in Tehran. With no script, no score and no intervention, it records children’s unstructured movement and interaction in static, natural-light frames. Made early in his career for Kanun, it exemplifies his commitment to unvarnished presence over narrative artifice.

Downpour

Bahram Beyzai’s 1972 debut is a black-and-white Iranian drama following a teacher’s quiet integration into a provincial town. With restrained performances, sparse sound, and deliberate pacing, it traces his unspoken relationship with a student’s sister, his solitary renovation of a derelict school theatre, and his eventual transfer — all rendered without exposition or catharsis. Restored in 2011 after near-total loss, it remains a study in moral ambiguity, institutional silence, and the weight of unperformed expectation.

Fellow Citizen

Fellow Citizen (1983) is Abbas Kiarostami’s 48-minute observational documentary, shot on a Tehran street. It follows a civil servant attempting to regulate pedestrian and vehicle movement, capturing unscripted reactions without narration, interviews or contextual framing. The film’s method is rigorously restrained: fixed camera, natural sound, no edits that conceal time. Its interest lies in behavioural nuance — hesitation, mimicry, negotiation — rather than argument or exposition.

First Graders

First Graders (1984) is Abbas Kiarostami’s observational documentary following Iranian six- and seven-year-olds during a single school day. Filmed with concealed cameras, it avoids narration, music, or intervention, relying instead on long takes, natural sound, and uninflected framing. Its purpose is not exposition but sustained attention — to register the rhythms, hierarchies and quiet labours of early socialisation as they occur. Though rooted in Iran’s post-revolutionary educational context, it offers no explicit commentary on politics or pedagogy. Its power lies in accumulation: small gestures, repeated behaviours and unscripted silences build a portrait less of individuals than of collective habit. A rigorous, unsentimental work, it rewards patience and resists easy interpretation.

Homework

Homework (1989) is Abbas Kiarostami’s 16mm documentary filmed at a Tehran primary school, composed almost entirely of interviews with pupils and two fathers about the practice of assigning homework. With no narration, music or illustrative footage, it foregrounds unscripted speech — hesitant, contradictory, revealing — to expose the gap between educational policy and domestic reality in late-1980s Iran.

It Was Just an Accident

Jafar Panahi’s 2025 Palme d’Or winner follows a group of former Iranian political prisoners who abduct a man they believe is their former torturer — only to find themselves paralysed by doubt, memory, and the sheer, stubborn reality of his humanity. Shot in secret in Iran without official permission, it unfolds across a single night and day, using minimal means to probe profound questions of identity, justice, and the cost of non-vengeance.

Ruhollah Khomeini

Ruhollah Khomeini, exiled in 1964 for opposing the Shah's modernisation programme, returned to Iran in February 1979 to lead the revolution that established the Islamic Republic, built around his own doctrine of clerical governance. His rule included the 444-day American hostage crisis, the devastating war with Iraq, and documented mass executions of political prisoners, alongside a 1989 fatwa against author Salman Rushdie that extended his authority's reach well beyond Iran's borders.

Saddam Hussein

From a Ba'athist plotter in 1959 to president from 1979 to 2003, Saddam Hussein built one of the Arab world's more literate, industrialised states while running a security apparatus that Human Rights Watch estimates killed or disappeared a quarter of a million people. He invaded Iran, then Kuwait, survived one war and was toppled by another, and was hanged in 2006 after a trial for a single 1982 massacre.

Iran–Iraq War

Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran in September 1980, aimed at exploiting the chaos of Iran's revolution and reclaiming disputed border territory, opened an eight-year war that killed an estimated 450,000 to 500,000 people and ended in 1988 with no permanent territorial change on either side. The conflict drew simultaneous American, Soviet and Arab state support for Iraq despite documented Iraqi chemical weapons use, a convergence of Cold War and regional interests that historians still treat as one of the war's most striking features.

Iranian Revolution

Mass protests against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi grew through 1978 into a revolution that forced his departure from Iran in January 1979 and brought the exiled cleric Ruhollah Khomeini back to establish an Islamic Republic that February. The coalition that toppled the Shah spanned Islamist, liberal, socialist and communist groups, but Khomeini had kept his plan for clerical rule largely hidden beforehand, and once in power he moved to eliminate the secular allies who had helped bring him there.

National Iranian Oil Company

BP

BP’s origin story is not about entrepreneurship or engineering — it is about a sovereign concession enabling extraction. Its business model depends on controlling physical assets and political access, not market creation or product innovation.

Peugeot 405

The Peugeot 405 is a large family car designed by Peugeot and styled by Pininfarina, produced from 1987 to 1997 in Europe and under license in Iran until 2020. It shares its floorpan with the Citroën BX but lacks hydropneumatic suspension except on 4x4 variants. It was voted European Car of the Year for 1988 by the largest number of votes in the history of the contest. About 2.5 million vehicles have been sold worldwide, both in left and right drive versions, as a saloon and estate. In early 2020, the 33-year production run of the Peugeot 405 was counted as the 'twentieth most long-lived single generation car in history'. Its appearance is similar to the Alfa Romeo 164, launched the same year and also styled by Pininfarina.

Aush reshteh

Chelow kabab

Fesenjān

Ghormeh sabzi

Halva

Hyderabadi biryani