It has been almost forty years since Dariush Mehrjui turned the attention of the world to Iranian cinema with his film Cow. Made in 1969 and banned for some time, until a copy was smuggled and shown at the Venice Film Festival, this rural drama won over critics and became a cult film in Iran. Mehrjui made twenty more feature films but his works, even after the Revolution and especially his women’s cycle from the 1990s, have been closely monitored by censors. Iranian New Wave, announced by Mehrjui’s films, has a rich history. Over time Iranian government’s censorship loosened thus revealing the formerly hidden weak spots of Iranian society. The selection of films in this program shows how the once most common themes of Iranian films such as benign yearnings of children and old men and rural ambiances are replaced by serious, mostly urban topics. The only director who keeps on avoiding to face these more serious tpics is the mos famous and once “problematic” Mehrjui.

Even so, his humorous family drama Mother's Guest from 2004, reveals the bizarre faces of Iranian society brought together in a provincial courtyard where the inhabitants show support for their neighbor who is on a verge of a nervous breakdown. The garden ensemble gathers and prepares food for the neighbor’s guests because her husband failed to do so. The husband in this film is crazy about film and is a great fan of Still Life and Sohrab Shahid Sales (this film was shown in Tuškanac in March 2005), the great Iranian director from 1970s, to whom Mehrjui pays respect in this film.

Highly acclaimed both in Iran and abroad is the director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, who made the notable The Blue Veiled (1995) and (together with Mohsen Abdolvahab) the film Mainline (2006), drama about a young Iranian bride who is trying to kick her drug habit and thus opens the black box of the dysfunctional family a few days before the wedding. It was shot in a trendy documentary style in urban exteriors.

Abbas refei’s film The Sun Shines on All Equally (2007) deals with the problem of emotional alienation. It is a road movie with religious elements about two friends on a quest, one unusual kidnapping and finally power of love and faith. Kiomars Pourahmad’s film Night Bus (2007) takes place on the road as well, as it became a common stage for contemporary Iranian films, but this time it is full of war and moral traps. This adventure of frightful Iranian soldiers escorting thirty Iraqi prisoners reminds us of the Iranian relationship with the neighbors.

One of the curiosities of Iranian film is the adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s drama Death And the Maiden into the Iranian ambience and political context. Unavoidably it has to be compared to Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the same drama, but it also offers a traumatized view of the period before the Islam revolution to which Iranian film often but rarely openly refers to. (Diana Nenadić)