iranian new wave

An eight-year-old takes home his friend's exercise book by mistake and spends Where Is The Friend's House? trying to give it back before the friend is expelled. That is the scale Iranian cinema has worked at since 1969, through a revolution and around a censor. Kiarostami pushed the same scale into nonfiction when the material offered it: Close-Up is built out of a real court case, casting the actual people, after a man was arrested for passing himself off as the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Farhadi keeps the errand but raises the stakes to a family: A Separation puts a couple between emigrating for their daughter's sake and staying to look after a father with Alzheimer's. Natural light, long takes, people who are not actors, and the whole moral weight of a film resting on a decision that would fit inside an afternoon.

Distinguish from Slow Cinema shares formal restraint and long takes but is an international aesthetic tendency, not a national cinema tradition. Iranian New Wave films are often more narratively driven than slow cinema's contemplative mode.