I am extremely honoured by Sara Ghazi Asadollahi’s generous invitation to participate in this edition of In Media Res, which has as its theme Through Forbidden Frames: New Visions in Contemporary Iranian Cinema.

Sara (if I may) in particular highlighted in her invitation how various recent Iranian films, including The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024), My Favourite Cake (Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, 2024), and Critical Zone (Ali Ahmadzadeh, 2023), have been ‘produced under immense restrictions and risks, without legal or government permission,’ and that these films might therefore elude the categorisations of ‘festival cinema’ and/or ‘non-cinema,’ the latter being a concept devised independently but in many overlapping ways by both Lúcia Nagib (2020) and myself (Brown, 2018).

As far as my own conceptualisation of ‘non-cinema’ is concerned (film no longer made using film stock; film no longer circulating in cinemas; film as an accessible medium, even if low budgets generate different/new aesthetics), I can only say that, among the most recent Iranian and transnational Iranian films that I have seen, digital technology does indeed continue to enable the production of work that might not have been possible via traditional routes, especially with regard to the various stages of approval required for ‘official’ film productions in the Islamic Republic. What is more, there continues to be a strong presence of darkness in Iranian films, as well as self-referential components, especially in the growing body of work that explores the archives of Iranian cinema—something that I shall touch upon below.

That being said, there is perhaps also a renewed urgency in current Iranian cinema, and one that is mapped by a kind of ongoing pessimism (which may be optimism), especially in films that emerge in the wake of the Zan, Zindagi, Azadi, or Women, life, freedom movement, which itself erupted in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini in late 2022.

What I hope to sketch here, then, are some brief thoughts that have as their focus four interlinked images, which are included above as per IMR’s typical focus on media objects, but beyond which I hope also quite widely and suggestively to range, even as this latter step is perhaps not so much in keeping with a typical IMR post.

The first is from Ahmad Bahrami’s The Wasteman (2024), the third in the director’s trilogy of ‘waste’ films that also includes The Wasteland (2020) and The Wastetown (2022). It is a film set amidst a decaying, abandoned village—not wholly dissimilar to where Rasoulof brings to a close his Seed of the Sacred Fig—and in which a male figure silently trudges earth around on a cart (The Wasteman features no dialogue), gathering belongings and burying a dead dog, as well as himself on at least two occasions.

Shot in black and white, the film is, according to its director, a comment on dictatorship, in that the male figure, played by Ali Bagheri, is perhaps a tyrant who has succeeded in eliminating all of his opponents and who thus wanders the world alone. While there is much one could say about the film in general, however, I want to focus solely on the image of the man digging a hole in the ground. We return to this action several times, with the film culminating in the man lying down once again in the hole, tipping over his cart, which he has filled with dirt, and, in principle, burying himself alive. Except that the man fails to die. Instead, covered in dirt, he sits up, stands up, and then shovels earth once again onto the cart (Figure 01) [1].

It is a moment full of Beckettian absurdity and Sisyphean repetition, suggesting that Iranian cinema is waiting… But for what? Importantly, this is a moment that recalls Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), in which Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) also digs for himself a hole in the ground and seeks to lie down in it. Despite being reminded of the titular delights of fruit in one’s mouth, Kiarostami’s film ends with Badii in limbo—before cutting to digital making-of images as Louis Armstrong’s ‘St. James Infirmary Blues’ (1929) begins to play. Where Badii may or may not die, however, the tyrant in The Wasteman cannot.

Dead bodies and/or holes in the ground are seemingly a common motif of late (if not always). Examples: Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) burying Faramarz (Esmaeel Mehrabi) in My Favourite Cake; Zara (Mina Kavani) drowned in No Bears(Jafar Panahi, 2022); the victims dumped outside Mashhad by Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani) in The Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi, 2022); the bus passengers disposing of a corpse in Cause of Death: Unknown (Ali Zarnegar, 2023); Iman (Missagh Zareh) falling through the floor in The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

The hole, this shallow grave, is a black hole, a site of gravity, a site beyond sight that is bound up with any and every sexuality, all of which are queer to an Iranian cinema that does not admit ‘straight’ depictions thereof. That is, desire runs rampant in these and other films of the moment, with taboos being broached and filmmakers showing no fear for the censors. Iranian cinema is, in this digital age, out of control. But it is also out of time; that is, it is locked into a battle unto death with those who would control it, who would make it ‘do time.’

What does it await? Perhaps À vendredi, Robinson (2022), Mitra Farahani’s staged epistolary encounter between Ebrahim Golestan and Jean-Luc Godard, suggests not just that Iranian cinema is waiting for Godard (Figure 02) [2], but perhaps it also awaits specifically his cause of death, namely assisted suicide. Or, as Ali Asgari has it in Higher than Acidic Clouds(2024), his own riff on This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, 2010), perhaps ‘the earth will open wide to swallow the colourless city [Tehran] whole’ (Figure 03) [3].

Iran, then, awaits its own death, still. Or perhaps it denies, like Saman (Sahar Sotoodeh) pretending that her husband is not dead in Wait Until Spring (Ashkan Ashkani, 2024), that it is dead already. Or, finally, it would perhaps prefer death if freedom is always to be denied it by the powers that be.

To be clear, rampant desire does not come in the form of nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary days, except in some reactionary corners. For, even as the popular filmfarsi and its relatives from the time of the Shahs offered explicit depictions of desire and sex, they, too, were controlled and controlling images constructing a heteronormative Iranian modernity. Coming along to queer that archive, then, are found footage artists like Maryam Tafakory, Kaveh Abbasian, Sahand Sarhaddi, Ehsan Khoshbakht, and Mania Akbari.

Black holes. Black screens. Louis Armstrong. Robinson’s Friday. As Parisa Vaziri (2023) has importantly shown, the heteropatriarchal Iran of filmfarsi and beyond is also ‘white’ in its aspirations, with that whiteness being built upon (anti-)Blackness.

Akbari’s archive film, How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish? (2023), made in collaboration with Khoshbakht and which takes its title from a line delivered to an aspiring actress in Ovanes Ohanian’s Haji Agha, the Cinema Actor (1933), opens and closes with the star of the now-quasi-and-posthumously-cancelled Kiarostami’s digital breakthrough, Ten(2002), depicted from above—lying in a bath that might also be a watery grave, surrounded by blackness. It is not the first time we have seen Akbari thus; a similar image inspired the obsession of Mark Cousins in their epistolary Life May Be(2014), which of course takes its title from Forough Farrokhzad, herself no stranger to Blackness. But since 2014, Akbari has been through a double mastectomy, as documented in A Moon for my Father (with Douglas White, 2019). And so over her chest, in black as opposed to frothy water, we now see an octopus (Figure 04) [4].

Cancer as a cephalopodic alien. Akbari as a cephalopodic alien, who discusses how filmfarsi created and controlled her. More importantly, filmfarsi’s dancing women as ‘dark-skinned’ – as one of the film’s numerous clips suggests. The black chador is linking the female body to a subjugation shared by the African slave, as per Vaziri’s argument. The disabled, out-of-control body is being linked via the octopus to a Blackness that also has been rendered invertebrate as we head from a dying Anthropocene towards the Chthulucene (see Brown and Fleming, 2020; Brown, 2023; Brown and Fleming, 2025).

If the ‘birth of a nation’ (as able-bodied, hetero-masculine, and white) was instituted by a cinematic anti-Blackness, then the death of a nation would seem to seek kinship with Blackness, while also moving beyond ‘cinema’ (and the ‘human’) as traditionally understood. Iranian cinema far exceeds Iran, hence its transnational nature—simultaneously queering, cripping, and trans*-ing the otherwise heteronormative and ‘cinematic’ nation, embracing a certain blackness, embracing death. Exceeding cinema in the realm of non-cinema. Working with a digital technology that itself was based upon the networked brain of the octopus (see Brown and Fleming, 2020).

If Iranian cinema has for Hamid Naficy (2012) been for some time ‘postal,’ then perhaps we might say that Iranian (non-)cinema in the digital era also anticipates this post-cinematic and post-national moment, even as it is a moment of dying (neither cinema nor Iran is quite dead yet; we are not in postcolonial, post-human, or post-national times, as the enraged and enraging vigour of contemporary colonialism, anthropocentrism, and nationalism makes clear; can there be post-capitalism when capitalism persists?). Not ‘postal,’ then, but ‘pre-postal.’

In being ‘pre-postal,’ Iran offers not just a ‘preposterous cinema,’ but also a vision of a future beyond the society of control sought for by the heteropatriarchal white man (which includes the heteropatriarchal, white Iranian man). Iran is struggling with reactionary forces that are as strong as anywhere (and everywhere) else in the world, but its filmmakers also offer collectively as powerful an example of how to combat and to undo those forces, not even if it would mean death, but rather also by loving death. Not trying and failing like a wasteman. But by being/becoming the black hole (waiting for Godard). Becoming death, the destroyer of worlds—not as light (as Robert J. Oppenheimer misunderstood ‘becoming death’ to be, and as the Islamic Republic would ‘officially’ seek it—at least as Donald J. Trump would have us fear), but as darkness. Preposterously, then, the death of a nation, the death of cinema, preposterous Iran: this is a sense of what is to come – as the neighbour of Rahmaneh Rabani’s father-in-law suggests in her and Bahman Kiarostami's Impasse (2024) (Figure 05) [5]. But this may not just be the end of the Islamic Republic, but the end of the Islamic Republic preposterously announcing the end of all nations. The heavens will tremble, and a new era will begin.[6]

References

Brown, William (2018). Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude, London: Bloomsbury.

Brown, William (2023) Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene. Winchester: Zer0 Books.

Brown, William, and David H. Fleming (2020). The Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Brown, William, and David H. Fleming (2025). Infinite Ontologies of the Chthulustream, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Naficy, Hamid (2012). A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalising Era, 1984–2010, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Nagib, Lúcia (2020). Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Vaziri, Parisa (2023). Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

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[1] Figure 01: The man (Ali Bagheri) sits up after trying to bury himself alive in The Wasteman (Ahmad Bahrami, 2024). Frame grab from FestivalScopePro.

[2] Figure 02: Ebrahim Golestan considers a projected image of Jean-Luc Godard near the end of his life in À vendredi, Robinson (Mitra Farahani, 2022). Frame grab from YouTube.

[3] Figure 03: Ali Asgari reflects upon the fate of Tehran from his apartment in Higher than Acidic Clouds (2024). Frame grab from Vimeo (thanks to Milad Khosravi at Seven Springs Pictures).

[4] Figure 04: A black frame surrounds Mania Akbari, who lies in a bath of inky water with an octopus covering her chest in How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish? (2023). Frame grab from Vimeo.

[5] Figure 05: Figure 05: A neighbour of filmmaker Rahmaneh Rabani's father-in-law discusses how the Women, life, freedom movement might spell the end of the Islamic Republic in Rabani and Bahman Kiarostami's Impasse (2024). Frame grab from the the Rebel Flesh series of films curated by Homa Sarabi and co-presented online by ArteEast and UnionDocs as part of the former's Unpacking the ArteArchive program.

[6] The author would like to thank Mehran Abdollahi and Farimah Mahmoodi for their helpful conversations in the months preceding the composition of this short essay.