Passion for movies has hardly ever been more political than in Iran. Over the past century, drastic political change in certain countries has split the personality of the country’s film culture into two distinct halves. Usually, the new ideology ostracised and undermined the one that it had displaced. But in scarcely any other country has extreme change – a revolution – worked to make access to the past virtually impossible. The Islamic regime in Iran made watching any type of film outside strictly defined codes an illegal activity; doing so shunted the act of loving cinema into counterculture.
The regime’s aim, though never explicitly pronounced, was to destroy images of alternative realities and worlds. It is not yet clear how many films went up in smoke during the film incineration campaign of the early 1980s, a tragic episode still denied by the regime. This is the point when cinephilia became a hazardous occupation.
