In the late 1980s, Iranian post-revolutionary cinema burst upon an unsuspecting world. Isolated examples of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, such as Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow (1969) and Sohrab Shahid Saless's A Simple Event (1973) and Still Life (1974), had screened in the west, but most pre-revolution films were for a popular audience and of little international interest. After the burning of film theatres and the regime's initial pronouncements against cinema, Ayatollah [...]