Along with China, Iran has been lauded as one of the exporters of great cinema in the nineties. The history of film production in Iran, however, dates back to early 1930s when a few silent comedies added a domestic flavor to a film menu that had featured foreign films for thirty years.

The first Iranian talkie, The Lor Girl (1934), was the first of several feature films made in India by an Iranian expatriate, Abdol-hossein Sepanta, for the Iranian market. After a decade-long lull caused by WWII, film production in Iran resumed in 1949. The low-quality melodramas and comedies made in this period, set the foundation for a purely commercial cinema which dominated the Iranian screens for the next thirty years.

The decade preceding the 1979 Revolution saw the quiet emergence of an Iranian New Wave. A group of artists and intellectuals denounced the existing escapist cinema and launched a movement producing indigenous films of high cinematic quality and social consciousness. The film that heralded the new cinema was Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow, a disturbing tale of poverty and mental breakdown in which the mysterious death of the only cow in a village drives its owner insane.

Despite its poor box-office performance, the critical success of The Cow paved the way for a modest annual supply of "New Wave" films and an alternative film
environment. It was this environment that helped breed a generation of filmmakers that are now considered the old masters of the Iranian cinema, though they are still in their fifties. Beside Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, Bahram Bayzai (Bashu, the Little
Stranger), Amir Naderi (The Runner), Parviz Sayyad (The Mission), and Sohrab
Shaheed Saless (Still Life), are among the filmmakers who started their careers in this period.

The New Wave filmmakers were hampered in their efforts by a harsh system of
censorship that essentially kept them from dealing directly with the unpleasant realities of the Iranian life. The Cow originally was banned because of its uncompromising depiction of despair in an impoverished village. The film was conditionally released only after it won praise in Venice Film Festival. The codes forced the filmmakers to resort to symbolic communication in exploring social and political issues, or make less complicated films about simple characters and ordinary situations. This explains the symbolic complexities of some films and the amazing simplicity of the others, including the emergence of a peculiar genre of films with child characters that were not made necessarily for children.

The Islamic Revolution in 1979 initially struck a near-fatal blow to cinema in Iran. More than 180 movie theaters fell victim to the wrath of the fanatic arsonists who perceived movies as agents of moral corruption; film production came to a halt; many filmmakers were indicted, on charges such as "corrupting the public," and purged; nearly 2,200 previously shown domestic and foreign films were re-inspected and just over 200 of them received screening permits. Some of these films had to be cut extensively before returning to screens.

In an attempt to establish an "Islamic, anti-Imperialist" cinema, a new set of highly
restrictive censorship codes brought the film production under the tight control of the government. Most of these codes were aimed at the representation of female
characters. Strict Islamic dress codes require women to cover their hair in public, and wear loose-fitting outer garments to cloak their body curves. Also, women can only be intimate with the immediate members of their family. Therefore, actors playing couples could not even touch each other's hands on the screen unless they are married in real life. Female characters' hair should always be covered, even when they are asleep in the privacy of their house. The restrictions, causing unrealistic presentation of women, have forced many filmmakers to give up on the idea of making films about couples and their relationships altogether.

Currently, film censorship is implemented in four stages : First, the script must be
approved to ensure its content is appropriate; second, the list of cast and crew must be submitted to receive a production permit; third, the finished film is sent to the censorship board, which may approve it unconditionally, require changes, or ban it altogether; finally, the producers of the approved film must apply for a screening permit. The last stage subjects the film to a three-tier letter rating system -- A, B, and C -- determining the film's booking and its access to the media for promotion.

Film ratings in Iran don't have the same meaning they do here. They have nothing to do with the content ot the film; content is normally monitored at the script-approval stage. The ratings grade the quality ot the films. An A-rated film would be allowed to be advertised on the government-controlled television, and shown in the best theaters at the most desirable times for a guaranteed period. C-rated films, on the other hand, not only would be denied promotion on television, but would be released for only a limited time in the worst theaters during the off-peak times of the film season. All these controls amount to a multi-layered system or film censorship that not only decides the content of a film, but also determines how the marketplace will react to it. American and European
films are virtually impossible to import, since few of them would conform to these rules. The government is the sole importer ot the limited number of films that are found appropriate for distribution.

Film production is allowed in the private sector as well. An average Iranian film costs about $150,000 to produce. The annual production has been steadily rising to the pre-revolutionary levels of between 60 to 70 films a year. There are about 300 directors making films in Iran, of which a dozen are women. But it is largely the films of about ten elite filmmakers that account for almost all Iranian festival representations.

Despite restrictions, Iranian films have been shining in international arenas over the past ten years. Major film festivals sometimes go out of their way to acquire a film by directors such as Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf. More importantly, the fact that every year about twenty new directors make their debut films promises that Iran will continue to remain a reservoir of new cinematic talent and fresh filmmaking for years to come.

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