The Best Iranian Movies: Essential Iranian Cinema for Global Audiences
For more than four decades, Iranian filmmakers have shaped one of the most quietly influential cinematic traditions in the world. Below is a curated list of the best Iranian movies — the essential viewing that explains why Iranian cinema is so revered by critics, festivals, and filmmakers alike.
Why Iranian cinema is so good
Iranian films prize observation over spectacle. Directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, and Jafar Panahi turned everyday ethical dilemmas — a lost shoe, a forged signature, a family caught between duty and desire — into moral cinema of rare precision. That restraint, paired with a poetic realist tradition rooted in Persian literature, is what makes the country's best films travel so far beyond its borders.
Ten essential Iranian films
- A Separation (2011) — Asghar Farhadi's Oscar-winning drama about a couple's divorce and the working-class caregiver caught in the middle. The gold standard for contemporary Iranian cinema.
- Close-Up (1990) — Kiarostami's docu-fiction masterpiece about a man who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Endlessly reinventive.
- Taste of Cherry (1997) — Palme d'Or winner. A man drives through the hills outside Tehran looking for someone to bury him.
- Children of Heaven (1997) — Majid Majidi's tender story of a brother and sister sharing one pair of shoes. Nominated for the foreign-language Oscar.
- The Salesman (2016) — Farhadi's second Academy Award winner. Marriage, dignity, and revenge in modern Tehran.
- Where Is the Friend's House? (1987)— The first film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy. A schoolboy's small act of conscience becomes an epic.
- The Circle (2000) — Jafar Panahi's Venice-winning look at the constraints on women's lives.
- The Color of Paradise (1999) — Majidi's luminous drama about a blind boy and his father.
- This Is Not a Film (2011) — Panahi's smuggled-out video-diary made under house arrest. Cinema at its most defiant.
- The Cow (1969) — Dariush Mehrjui's landmark of the pre-revolution Iranian New Wave. The film that put Iranian cinema on the international map.
Where to start on IRAN
The classics above are widely available on the festival circuit and archive platforms. IRAN focuses on original Iranian short films — the next generation of filmmakers working in that same tradition. Membership unlocks the full catalog, in HD, with human-translated English and Persian subtitles.