Compliance and Resistance in Iranian Cinema’s Censorship Landscape: A New Approach to Analyzing Iranian Films

I have observed a persistent issue of reading Iranian films based on censorship and resistance in many realms, including media, film festivals, reviews, and academia. In this paper, I will show how some significant scholars of Iranian cinema, though having contributed to our understanding of censorship immensely, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, have focused on resistance and have conducted a unidimensional reading of Iranian films. I call this fetishizing resistance and propose a more contextual approach that, instead of selectively isolating moments in films, aims to read them more contextually to illuminate the complex intricacies of making films under the censorship of the Iranian government, demonstrating films' resistance as well as the injection of the Islamic Republic's ideas into them. The Islamic Republic is an authoritarian state that seeks to control and deploy all aspects of information and communication technologies, including filmmaking. It regulates public discourse and individual expression, injecting its ideas into films with various techniques. In the following, I discuss how censorship works in Iran. Many studies on Iranian censorship do not investigate the mechanism of production and resistance in Iranian cinema, creating a gap in their analysis, which could be the reason for their shortcomings.