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Although its history dates back over a century, Iranian film only began to acquire an international reputation in the 1990s, as the humanist features of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf started to find an audience beyond the festival circuit. Centring on a fan who tries to pass himself off as Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990) set the tone for the wry studie... [+]

Although its history dates back over a century, Iranian film only began to acquire an international reputation in the 1990s, as the humanist features of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf started to find an audience beyond the festival circuit. Centring on a fan who tries to pass himself off as Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990) set the tone for the wry studies of ordinary people that stood in stark contrast to the impression presented in the Western media of life inside the Islamic Republic. But Kiarostami grew more critical of the authorities as the decade progressed, with the Palme d'or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) conveying his sense of frustration with restrictions that were imposed even more stringently upon women.

As Kiarostami focused on women's faces in Ten (2002) and Shirin (2008), he began to simplify his technique to the point where it essentially became avant-garde in Five (2003). While he was forced to move abroad to complete projects like Certified Copy (2010), Makhmalbaf remained in Iran to encourage his daughter Samira and wife Marzieh Meshkini to tackle the plight of women and children in such deceptively trenchant pictures as The Apple (1998), At Five in the Afternoon (2003) and Stray Dogs (2004), which found echo in works by Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven, 1997), Rafi Pitts (Sanam, 2000) and Jafar Panahi (Offside, 2006).

However, just as films about ethnic minorities and cultural non-conformists like Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon (2006) and No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009) had critics hoping that Iran was fostering a Cinema of Moral Anxiety similar to the one that presaged the emergence of Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s, the authorities clamped down on freedom of expression after the failure of the Green Wave. Consequently, Asghar Farhadi's Oscar win for A Separation (2011) was virtually ignored, while Panahi, under house arrest and banned from directing for offending the ultra-conservative regime, was reduced to smuggling This Is Not a Film (2011) out of the country on a memory stick hidden inside a cake. [-]