Iranian New Wave

It started in 1964 with Hajir Darioush's second film Serpent's Skin, which was based on D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover featuring Fakhri Khorvash and Jamshid Mashayekhi.

Other films such as Farrokh Ghaffari's The Night of the Hunchback (1964), Ebrahim Golestan's Brick and Mirror (1965), and Fereydoun Rahnema's Siavush in Persepolis are all considered to be precursors as well.

The first films considered to be part of this movement are Davoud Mollapour's Shohare Ahoo Khanoom (1968),[1] Masoud Kimiai's Qeysar and Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow (1969).

Other films considered to be part of this movement are Nasser Taghvai's Tranquility in the Presence of Others (1969/1972) which was banned and then heavily censored upon its release, Bahram Beyzai's Downpour, and Sohrab Shahid Saless's A Simple Event (1973) and Still Life (1974).

Issa claims that "This new, humanistic aesthetic language, determined by the film-makers' individual and national identity, rather than the forces of globalism, has a strong creative dialogue not only on homeground but with audiences around the world.

There is a line back from modern Iranian cinema to the ancient oral Persian storytellers and poets, via the poems of Omar Khayyam.

According to Dabashi, "the visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity."