Abe Silberstein in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
In theory, a fundamentalist religious dictatorship should not be a hospitable environment for an extraordinary artistic flowering whose treasures continue—four decades later—to please, confound, and reinvent themselves to audiences around the world. Yet this seems to be exactly the case with Iran’s cinematic output since 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers consolidated power in the wake of the Shah’s departure. (The Shah was himself a tyrant, but of the kind who sought to project a modern and art-friendly image.) We are all familiar with artists, writers, and filmmakers circumventing official and de facto censors to produce subversive masterpieces. But the consistency of Iranian cinema’s march across the world stage over the last 30-plus years suggests that something more powerful than individual creativity is at play—rather, a kind of relentless cultural force inexorably punching through whatever obstacles an authoritarian government places in its way.
More here.