In early 1991, just a few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, American audiences were feted with Not Without My Daughter, a Sally Field film that touched on some of the most harrowing fears an American could experience. Also, some of the most offensive ones.
Based on the real-life heroine’s memoir from a few years earlier, the movie centered on an Iranian man who tricks his American wife into going to the country and traps her there, using their child as a hostage. As one of the first pieces of mainstream entertainment about post-Revolution Iran, it opened Western moviegoing eyes to a country that hadn’t been thought of since the freeing of U.S. hostages a decade earlier (and played on the same anxieties of that incident). But it only did so in the most paper-thin and cartoonishly evil way. The film’s director, Brian Gilbert, and the actor who played the villainous ex-husband, Alfred Molina, were Brits with little obvious connection to the country, and it showed in the cringey final product. Watch it now and see what you think. Or, better yet, don’t. The only reassurance is that the film’s woman-against-the-system plotline was so generic most viewers would forget where it was about in the first place.
This past Monday, 35 years after Daughter’s release in theaters and with his nation’s tyrannical regime teetering, Jafar Panahi, Iran’s cinematic poet laureate — and, lately, his country’s explainer-in-chief — was a television guest, along with his translator, on Jon Stewart’s night of The Daily Show. The interview wasn’t terribly insightful — the host seemed more interested in congratulating Panahi for being a hero than in exploring the context for that heroism. But the very fact that a non-English speaking dissident was in a late-night chair casually describing his layered Middle Eastern country was its own feat. The Stewart interview repped a watershed moment — it showed not only how far we’ve come in trying to understand the nuances of Iran but cinema’s role in shaping that understanding.
Like many such changes, it happened gradually The rest of the 1990’s saw few mainstream Iranian entertainments, and 9/11 and the regional sweep-up of anxieties that followed threatened to plunge us right back into Gilbertian territory. But in 2003, as part of that post-9/11 moment, Miramax put out House of Sand and Fog, about an Iranian immigrant, Massoud Behrani (Ben Kingsley), and a quickly escalating disagreement with an American woman over a piece of real estate. The movie seemed not that much more interested in explaining where Behrani came from, but it humanized an Iranian character in a way Daughter never did. And it yielded a trio of pivotal moments later in the decade.
Early in 2007, with then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rattling anti-Western and anti-gay policies, Andy Samberg and SNL put out their proto viral “Iran So far” short caricaturing the Iranian leader, slyly criticizing his homophobia by making him the object of his bigotry. It was one of the first pop-cultural signposts that the people of Iran were victims, living under a regime they didn’t like either. The end of the year brought Persepolis, which grabbed the baton Samberg extended and took off. Marjane Satrapi’s adaptation of her graphic memoir about fleeing the revolution became an arthouse breakout, with some 600,000 North Americans turning out to see it, and it garnered an animated-feature Oscar nomination alongside Hollywood mainstays like Ratatouille and Surf’s Up.
And then, in the spring of 2009, No One Knows About Persian Cats, a documentary about Tehran’s suppression-fighting underground rock scene. The film made a splash at Cannes just a few weeks before the country’s presidential protests broke out over Ahmadinejad claiming a victory all his opponents said was rigged. The so-called Iranian Green Movement became an inflection point not just there but here — you couldn’t step onto the westside of Los Angeles without encountering massive displays of cars honking in protest and solidarity as they called for a free Iran, 30 years of the Islamic Republic and a decade of cultural ferment all coming to a head. To drive through it was both to experience a kind of cinematic thrill and attain a level of comprehension only the movies could prepare you for.
By the time the 2010’s rolled around, audiences were primed for a foreign-film conquest. The appetite converged with a whole generation of filmmakers that had spent its youth under the early years after the Revolution. A renaissance of Iranian stories, told from Iran, by Iranians, began making inroads. Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation — a domestic drama that becomes a low-key critique of the Iranian judicial system — turned into a box-office breakout in late 2011 and early 2012 and would go on to win best foreign-language film and land an original screenplay nom at the Oscars. That same year Panahi put out This Is Not a Film, his brilliant meta workaround to a filmmaking ban, with keyed-in Americans appreciating the resourcefulness.
A Farhadi movie would win the foreign Oscar again five years later; The Salesman was a story about a woman attacked as a metaphor for a blindsided country, the director brilliantly re-appropriating the ultimate American drama Death of a Salesman to make the point. Iranian auteurs like Abbas Kiarostami had been around for decades winning prizes at Cannes, of course. But suddenly everyday Americans became osmotically aware of everyday Iranian concerns. (Jon Stewart directed his own fact-based Iranian drama, Rosewater, in 2014, about a political prisoner who had gotten in trouble for appearing on his show.)
The industry became newly sensitized too. It was now unconscionable that anyone would ever greenlight a Not Without My Daughter, as MGM did just a few decades before. That can sound like performative wokeism. But an industry that went from celebrating a movie about an Iranian ogre kidnapping an American woman to movies about Iranian people themselves held hostage by a tyrannical state showed exactly why cinematic choices matter. Not for nothing did the percentage of Americans with a favorable “overall opinion” of Iran go from a paltry 2 percent in 1990 to an at least not-shameful 15 percent in 2020, according to Gallup.
Against all this backdrop has come the remarkable moment of Iranian cinema over the past 18 months, with Panahi’s It was Just an Accident becoming an almost cultural trope (and Oscar screenplay and foreign-film nominee) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (set in and featuring footage from 2022’s Women, Life, Freedom protests) a crowning moment of its own. Rasoulof and Panahi have fueled the understanding with their personal stories too, the former fleeing from Iran under the sword of a prison sentence and the latter running toward it.
Demographic factors have played a role in all this. At the time of Not Without My Daughter we were just a decade removed from the wave of post-Revolution refugees arriving on these shores — a long way from the half a million Iranian-American citizens of Los Angeles, Long Island and North Dallas, the children of that era now middle-aged and often with children themselves. A whole generation had grown up intermingled with Americans in some of our biggest cities. Domestic movie releases both reflected these changes while also nudging them along.
So normalized had Iranian concerns become to American audiences that we even got moments of them in mainstream TV thrillers. The third season of Showtime’s Homeland in 2013 was set in Iran, and several years later Tehran debuted on Apple TV+. While more backdrop than engine, the tensions many Iranians feel between love for homeland and hatred for regime were evident just the same, via a host of characters in both shows. When Iranian CIA officer Fara Sherazi (played by Nazanin Boniadi, whose own parents fled Tehran with her as a baby in 1980), chastises Carrie Mathison that she should see distinctions between regime and people — “There wouldn’t be an operation if it weren’t for me…so don’t treat me like I’m the enemy” — she was educating all of us, too. The final episode of the third season of Tehran — with the capital city of the country facing existential peril from both the regime and outside forces — debuted hours before American bombs began falling on the IGRC and the mullahs. The significance was hard to miss.
To watch any of these pieces isn’t just to understand a culture but to see into its future, a rare case of entertainment forerunnering events instead of following them. The teenage-daughter heroine in Seed rebelling against an older autocracy that she and her generation neither chose nor want offers a crystal ball into the protests of the past few months. In fact, It Was Just An Accident, with its story of former political prisoners deciding what to do with a possible tormentor, goes with shrewd prescience beyond the current moment to ask how the regime’s many victims should treat it after it’s fallen, the movies once again stirring questions in us we’ve not yet realized we need to ask.