Iranian cinema arrived at the Venice Film Festival this year with two feature films. Both reflected a strategy increasingly familiar in Iranian life: there is one version presented to the authorities and another one closer to reality.
Ali Asgari’s “A Bit of Light,” in the main competition, tells the story of a doctor pushed toward suicide after his arrest and the closure of his medical practice.
Mohsen Gharaei’s “Falling House,” in the Orizzonti (“Horizons”) section for upcoming filmmakers, is about a prison guard who loses his job and gradually turns his own home into another prison for his family.
By the festival’s final night, “Falling House” had become a story both in Venice and back home in Iran.
Laleh Marzban won the Orizzonti award for best actress for her performance in the film, after her appearance without the mandatory hijab helped fuel a controversy over the film inside Iran.
Like many things in Iran since the 1979 revolution, cinema has developed two versions: the one that can be presented to the authorities and the one underground.
The interesting part is that the line between the two is getting harder to find.
Gharaei is a particularly good example. He did not come from underground cinema. His previous films were made within Iran’s official system. He won a prize at the government-run Fajr Film Festival.
“Falling House” also received an official production permit. Gharaei has said the production was simply too large to make secretly. It needed established actors and a professional crew.
There was just one problem: the film the authorities thought they had permitted was not the film Gharaei intended to make.
“We gave them a kind of fake script,” Gharaei told Deadline in an interview published as the film premiered at Venice.
The permit allowed the filmmakers to assemble the cast and crew and, as he put it, “make the film we wanted to make.”
Gharaei’s admission did not go down well with conservative media in Iran. Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with the hardline Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, framed it bluntly in its headline: “I lied and gave them a fake script.”
For scenes involving sensitive dialogue or women without the mandatory hijab, Gharaei said he reduced the crew to a handful of people. Sometimes it was only him, Marzban and the cameraman. At other times they pretended they were rehearsing.
The admission becomes more interesting because Gharaei has described his purpose in language that seems almost contradictory.
After years of censorship and the changes in Iranian society, particularly after the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, he said he reached a point where he either had to stop making films or try to present “an honest image” of what was happening in Iran. That meant having to lie to make what he considered an honest film.
Inside Iran, the discussion was considerably less philosophical. After the first official image from “Falling House” showed Laleh Marzban without the mandatory hijab, Mehr News questioned how a film with an official production permit had ended up violating Iran’s filmmaking rules. The Cinematic Organization later said the permit had been issued after repeated reviews, revisions and a commitment from the producer to comply with its requirements.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with which Tasnim is associated, played a central role in suppressing domestic dissent, including protests, and Mehr operates within the Islamic Republic’s state-aligned cultural establishment.
Little wonder, then, that those outlets’ critical responses reflect the very political system whose restrictions the filmmakers were trying to evade.
There were consequences inside the bureaucracy too. An official responsible for film supervision was removed as criticism of the Cinematic Organization intensified. Iranian reports connected the timing to the “Falling House” controversy, although no official announcement linked the official’s removal to the film.
Everybody Is Blaming Everybody Else
Soon the argument became bigger than “Falling House.”
State-aligned and conservative media accused Gharaei of deception. Soureh, a cultural publication associated with the Islamic Republic’s institutional cultural establishment, described what happened as a betrayal of people who had helped the film obtain permission.
Then came an older accusation: cinema-ye jashnvarehei or “festival cinema.” The phrase has followed Iranian filmmakers for decades.
Its simplest version says some directors make films not for Iranians but for foreign festivals, seeking reward for giving Western audiences the poverty, repression and misery they expect to see.
Abbas Kiarostami, one of Iran’s most celebrated filmmakers, was one of the most famous targets of that argument.
In the 1980s and 1990s, critics complained about Iranian films filled with children, villages and poor families. Later, the subjects increasingly included women’s rights, political repression and social conflict.
The accusation is simple: Show foreigners a sufficiently miserable Iran and wait for the prize.
It is much harder to prove.
Kiarostami won the Palme d’Or for “Taste of Cherry,” about a man planning his suicide. Yet Asghar Farhadi later won two Oscars with films centered instead on family, class, marriage and moral choices. There has never been one simple recipe for Iranian success abroad.
Still, the festival-cinema argument can hardly be dismissed out of hand.
International festivals do more than show films. They select them, create reputations and help determine which Iranian stories reach international audiences.
When festivals repeatedly reward the same kind of Iranian films, does it affect Iranian cinema?
“A Bit of Light,” the other Iranian film shown at Venice, plays into that discussion. Its protagonist is again a man planning suicide, making the comparison with “Taste of Cherry” almost inevitable. Critics at Venice made it, too.
“In our country almost everything we do becomes political. Sometimes even having access to the internet becomes a political act,” Asgari told reporters at Venice on Friday.
He described cinema as a means of resistance to a system trying to control people’s lives. But he also spoke about something more ordinary: people shopping, children playing and daily life continuing while tragedy unfolds.
“Life and tragedy are happening at the same time,” he said.
The Iranian films at Venice retriggered a familiar barrage of blame. Filmmakers blame censorship for making deception necessary. State media blame filmmakers for abusing permits and commitments. Hardline cultural institutions blame Western festivals for rewarding a particular image of Iran. Filmmakers need those same festivals because films that collide with restrictions at home can acquire audiences and value abroad.
Marzban’s award does not prove the old accusation about “festival cinema,” but it is difficult to miss that the actress whose unveiled appearance helped make the film controversial inside Iran was the very one Venice rewarded.
Accepting the award, Marzban dedicated it to the women of Iran, saying they had paid the highest price for even the smallest forms of freedom while continuing to pursue their dreams.
The two Iranian films at Venice had another connection: the same Iranian producer.
Milad Khosravi and his Seven Springs Pictures are credited as producers on both “Falling House” and “A Bit of Light.” Venice lists “Falling House” as an Iran-U.S.-Germany production and “A Bit of Light” as involving Iran, Switzerland, Italy, Canada and Turkey.
So the two cinemas are not simply one inside Iran and another outside it. They overlap.
“Falling House” may be the clearest example. It did not reject the official system. It entered it, obtained its permission and, by its director’s own account, deceived it. Then it arrived at Venice, where the actress at the center of the controversy won one of the festival’s official acting prizes.
For decades, Iranian cinema could be described as having an official version and an underground one. Venice this year showed how much the two now overlap. The same filmmakers, actors and producers can move between both. A film can be Iranian, internationally financed, and officially permitted – yet still be unacceptable to the system that permitted it.
