Some Women Want to Wear It

Soraya Sebghati outlines a canon of 21st-century Iranian film.

By Soraya SebghatiJuly 28, 2025

• Film

• Cultural Studies

“I’VE BEEN TO IRAN before, and some women want to wear it,” the white music video director explained to me. He could sense that I had some hesitation to wear the hijab—and I did, but not for that reason. Earlier that week, I had auditioned for a commercial he was directing; instead of a callback, I got an email a little later saying that he actually wanted to get my availability to be in a music video for a major artist. All I was told was that the role was called “Birthday Girl,” and that I should bring some “fun” wardrobe options to set. I was pretty excited to have booked a job that seemed cool, with an incredible director.

When I walked into the wardrobe trailer, going-out-tops in hand, one of the stylists asked me if I knew how to properly put on “one of these.” She was thumbing a black scarf. I was a little confused, but ultimately realized what it meant. “No, I’ve never worn one before. Sorry!” My stomach dropped to my knees. I realized in that moment that I was cast not for my charisma or my beauty but because of my race. A paycheck’s a paycheck, I guess, but I want to be paid for my talent, not because I check a box. After all the work of pushing down the buzzing bees of anxiety, I only ended up wearing a hijab for a couple clips, because the crew didn’t properly clear the scarf with the fire marshal for the “blowing out the candles” scene. When the director was talking to me about this, I wanted so badly to explain that I wasn’t mad I had to wear the hijab, but that I did wish someone had let me know beforehand. And to be honest, the way he explained that he had been to Iran seemed to imply that, because I hadn’t, he would know better. That he would know my culture better.

I’d always held out hope that I could eventually visit Iran. My maternal grandparents had gone a couple of times in my childhood and come home bearing both gifts and tales from our family. Neither of my parents has returned to Iran since they left. I am a textbook “third culture” kid. I no longer speak Farsi—I grew up on it, and then rejected it in favor of English and Spanish at my Los Angeles preschool. In the aftermath of 9/11, I felt even more alienated: every single day, the news paraded some patriotic justification for the killing of people who looked like me, people who had the same names as my relatives. People with tan skin and a “backwards culture.”

The older I got, the more I wanted to reclaim my ancestry. I stopped referring to myself as “Persian” and chose the more confrontational “Iranian” as a litmus test for where people stood. I bought a necklace that spells my name in Farsi. I took my white friends to get kabob and ice cream. I immersed myself in the culture as much as I could. I began to think that at some point I could go to Iran. But the legal and safety reasons that kept my parents from returning persisted.

I don’t begrudge this director for having gone while I can’t. I’m glad that people have still been able to experience its beauty firsthand. But with the recent bombings and looming war, I don’t think I’ll get to visit the Iran that I hoped for. As a child, I told people I wanted to visit an Iran without compulsory hijab laws, or bans on public dancing. Now I don’t know if I’ll be able to see any version at all.

The closest I can get for now is through the movies—and if I may indulge in the Persian cultural pastime of pride in our people—we’re damn good at making them. In postrevolutionary Iran, there are so many rules that filmmakers have to follow, and the fact that such beautiful things come through the cracks of those rigid guidelines is nothing short of a miracle. And though Iranian cinema is well known for its family dramas, there’s quite a bit of genre play as well. Here are some highlights of the current century in Iranian cinema:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

I very clearly remember reading a capsule review of this movie in Nylon magazine, the arbiter of Cool. It was the first Persian-language film from the 21st century that I had ever watched, and it really opened my eyes to the fact that “cool Persians” existed out there—in stark contrast to the Beverly Hills variety that I had experienced most of my life, full offense. It blends Western, horror, and romance seamlessly, aided by what I consider one of the grooviest movie soundtracks of all time, with tracks from English-speaking artists including White Lies and Federale and from Iranian artists such as Kiosk, Dariush, and Radio Tehran. It’s a black-and-white Persian film that’s so steeped in American pop culture iconography that it sits perfectly in this sweet spot of understanding for the “third culture” viewer. It takes the chador (a legally mandated head covering in Iran specifically) and flips it into something delightfully dangerous. You may cover us up in a misguided attempt to protect us, but who will protect you from what we’re hiding?

Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi, 2022)

It’s an uncomfortable coincidence that this movie feels so indebted to the work of David Fincher, while the real-life murderer it’s based on has parallels with the Zodiac Killer. Like the Zodiac, the Spider Killer had open communication with the press, leaving clues about his ideologies and the reasons he did what he did. Abbasi’s 2022 film uses the real Spider killings from the turn of the century as a way to interrogate both the regime’s and the population’s negative attitudes toward women and sex workers. Here, the hijab literally becomes a weapon used to silence and suffocate the women it’s apparently meant to protect. It’s a very dark and unflinching look into these crimes, and unfortunately these attitudes feel universal, especially on the heels of the Diddy trial verdict.

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)

The first Iranian film to win an Academy Award, A Separation is probably the most well known on this list, and for good reason. The story is simple enough: an Iranian couple is going through a trial separation, and despite everyone’s best intentions, things go completely wrong. It’s rare that there’s not one person I’m blindly rooting for in a movie—every single person’s actions are somehow reasonable and justified. You can tell that everyone thinks they’re doing what’s best, and that’s what makes it so hard to watch at times, and why it feels so real. There are so many pieces to pick apart here too: misogyny (both in the regime and in the household), judgment of devoutly religious people, distrust of children, and even the weird attitudes we have toward Middle Eastern men. I dare anyone to come out of this movie with a clear idea as to who is right and who is wrong.

Under the Shadow (Babak Anvari, 2016)

Eighty-four minutes that blend real-life warfare with Islamic folk horror in a way that lays bare the monstrous nature of violence. Set during the Iran-Iraq War, this film focuses on a mother and daughter living in Tehran amid bombardment and air-raid sirens. A dirty bomb hits their apartment building, but it’s not bearing poison or disease—its unwelcome comorbidity is a djinn. Like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, this film takes the figure of a woman in a chador and turns it into something more sinister. It inverts expectation, transposing the familiar silhouette of a sheet ghost into an environment where it somehow makes more sense. More war movies should be horror films, actually.

Law of Tehran (Saeed Roustaee, 2019)

This taut police procedural/crime anti-thriller, alternatively titled Just 6.5 or 6.5 Toman per Meter, would be so perfect to watch at the AMC Burbank 16 (like To Live and Die in L.A., You Were Never Really Here, etc.). Roustaee has crafted a bleak and clever commentary on Iran’s war on drugs, and how the justice system might not actually be helping the situation at all. Despite the mode it operates in, it’s quite heavy emotionally. Between its anticlimax and cold digital photography, one can’t help but compare it to the later works of Michael Mann. In a war between addicts, dealers, and cops, nobody wins.

Taxi (Jafar Panahi, 2015)

In my Letterboxd review, I jokingly referred to this as “Jamshid Jarmoosh’s ‘Night on Earth.’” Panahi was banned from making movies in Iran for a few years, so in order to get around that, he filmed in secret, posing as a cab driver, taking both anonymous actors and his young niece around Tehran for a day. Blending fact and fiction seamlessly, Taxi is a beautiful look at the small corners of people’s lives in Iran’s biggest city. We see life and death, witness kindness and trickery, and meet criminals and family. Especially now, when post-9/11 racism is slowly coming back into fashion, this is a beautiful way to see the Tehran they won’t show on the news.

Hit the Road (Panah Panahi, 2021)

The debut feature of Jafar Panahi’s son, Panah Panahi, leaves quite a mark. This is a road movie, done in a way only Persians can: with the entire family in tow. This family is on the run for reasons I won’t ruin here, crisscrossing the Iranian countryside in a borrowed SUV. Dad has a broken leg, the dog is dying, Mom can’t keep it together, and while the youngest brother simply cannot stop singing/dancing/speaking, the elder brother barely lets a word escape his mouth. If I didn’t know I was watching a movie, I would’ve thought this was a real family. There is so much joy in this film that you almost forget there’s pain looming in the nearly opaque fog we see in the mountains here. Sidenote: maybe my favorite acting performance by a young child in anything I’ve ever seen.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024)

Perhaps in the wrong hands this could be used as fodder for Western propaganda about Iranian misogyny, but I think that if we spent all our time worrying about perfect representation through very real, sticky subject matter, we wouldn’t get anything done. It is a brave act to make a film criticizing the regime entirely in secret and to release it to the world, especially in a world where so few people in the West understand what the Women, Life, Freedom movement is all about. A very harrowing film whose MacGuffin is quite literally a Chekhov’s gun, it forced at least some portion of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to learn about the bravery of the Iranian people.

Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008)

Kiarostami is a master at playing with the very form of cinema, always calling attention to the fact that what we are watching is a construction. In Shirin, he takes this a step further—the audience becomes the movie. Juliette Binoche and 114 Iranian actresses sit down to watch a film adaptation of the Persian epic poem Khosrow and Shirin, and that’s all we see: their reactions. The only other thing we have to guide us is the dialogue track and score. But fear not, the playfulness doesn’t stop there. The film that these women are watching does not exist. Kiarostami has managed to create a coherent, emotional, and beautiful narrative out of seemingly nothing but a collage of moving face cards (and they’re lethal).

Honorable Mention

Universal Language (Matthew Rankin, 2024)

With its Persian title literally translating to “Song of the Turkey,” this one is indeed written and directed by a white Canadian (who also has a supporting role on-screen). Matthew Rankin speaks Farsi so well that my mom angrily uses him to reprimand me for not speaking it. The film takes place in an absurd version of Winnipeg where Canada’s national language is indeed Farsi, and it weaves together disparate threads from Rankin’s family history. Beautifully paying homage to the late Abbas Kiarostami, its transposition of old European stories to Persian people and culture reminds us that we might not be so different after all.