Courtesy of Maryam Keshavarz

There has never been an Iranian film like it. Circumstance is a love story about two renegade schoolgirls in Tehran who defy authority by cruising underground nightclubs, doing drugs, dancing to Persian hip hop, exploring lesbian romance—and helping dub bootlegs of banned movies like Milk and Sex and the City into Farsi. Circumstance, which won the audience award at Sundance, was shot in Lebanon, under clandestine conditions, and the footage was smuggled out of the country via Jordan to be processed in the U.S. The film’s director and cast hail from five countries in the Iranian diaspora—three of the actors, including the lead, live in Canada. By making the film, they know that under Iran’s current regime they can never set foot in their homeland again.

For decades, Iranian cinema has held a rarefied pedigree. Auteurs like Abbas Kiarostami won acclaim for exquisite neo-realist dramas, often about children, that eluded censorship by hiding politics behind a veil of metaphor. But recently, Iranian filmmakers have become bolder and are suffering the consequences. Last month six were imprisoned by authorities—including Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who co-directed This Is Not a Film with Jafar Panahi, a droll documentary that shows Panahi under house arrest in Tehran, acting out his next movie, and blocking scenes with masking tape on a Persian rug because he is banned from making a film for 20 years.

But as Iranian cinema faces the harshest repression in its history, it also seems poised to break out of the art-house ghetto. Not only was Circumstance a hit at Sundance, Iran’s A Separation was voted second most popular movie at the Toronto International Film Festival. Asghar Farhadi’s riveting drama follows a feud that erupts after a man undergoing a divorce hires a secretly pregnant woman to care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. The story is wired with a sly critique of Islamic patriarchy: in one scene the caregiver phones a morality hotline to ask if it’s a sin to change the old man’s soiled clothes. Nevertheless, A Separation is Iran’s official Oscar candidate.

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