words by Sergios Saropoulos
Some places live in headlines, and others live in memory. Iran has long been forced publicly into the first category, with stories of sanctions, nuclear negotiations, uprisings and repression. My heart always went against this syllogism, keeping stories of old and modern myths, from the Ring of Gyges to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, from the journey of Mithras to the historic memoir of mercenaries fighting for the ancient King Cyrus. Persia, Iran and my longing for the understanding of a country that had long ties, almost eternal to the story of my country, Greece, as enemy, as mysticism, as inspiration and cultural difference to the modern questions of Cold War politics and the interference of religion in political ideology.
To understand Iran, in cinema, in poetry, in whispered conversations between generations, in the resistance of everyday protests, we should begin not with geopolitics but with storytelling and its expression in art.
Persepolis shown within a map of Iran.
I will start in the opposite way of how Pandora opened her box in the famous mythological tale, and I will mention hope, hope before the shadows. The end of the Shah’s regime in 1979 was not experienced merely as the collapse of a monarchy. For many intellectuals, students, artists, and progressive forces, it was a moment saturated with hope. The Shah’s rule had grown increasingly authoritarian; inequality deepened; dissent was suppressed. Yet in the late 1970s, a wide spectrum of political and social groups, leftists, liberals, and religious activists, converged in the belief that something more just could emerge.
That emotional landscape is later rendered with heartbreaking clarity in Marjane Satrapi’s animated film Persepolis. Through the eyes of a child growing up during the revolution, we see the excitement of change, the optimism of collective action, and the belief that repression would give way to liberation. What the film captures with painful precision is the naivety of alliances formed without foreseeing what would follow. The progressive forces that joined hands with religious opposition could not fully anticipate that a new ideological order would soon take shape, one that would not merely replace the previous regime but control everyday life more intimately.
The tragedy of the revolution was not only its political outcome. It was the betrayal of hope. It is still a reminder that repression can give way to more repression, and this betrayal leaves a deeper psychological scar than oppression alone.
Moving linearly in time, body and ideology became connected in the reality of the new regime. After 1979, ideology ceased to be rhetoric and became structure. Gendered injustice was not simply cultural, but also codified into law. Mandatory hijab, legal inequality in matters of inheritance and testimony, restrictive guardianship systems, limits on movement and employment, were not isolated regulations but elements of a coherent theocratic architecture. This was the moment when ideology became visible in its most intimate form. It is no longer abstract doctrine it shapes but posture, clothing, gaze. When the state regulates the body, it does not merely control appearance but teaches anticipation too. It teaches fear before punishment, fragmentation, and a variation of public self, private self, digital self, and inner self. The body becomes an archive of ego storing memories of reprimanding, negotiation, and adaptation.
Cinema during these decades became one of the most subtle and profound expressions of this interior landscape. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) stands as one of its most haunting works. The film follows a middle-aged man driving through the outskirts of Tehran, searching for someone willing to bury him after he commits suicide. The narrative is minimalist, almost silent. The man drives through dusty terrain, speaking quietly to strangers, asking for a simple act, to cover his body with earth. The film can be read as an allegory for the death of a failed revolution, the quiet fatigue that follows deferred dreams. It does not depict protest; it depicts exhaustion. The protagonist’s journey is circular, hesitant, suspended between life and burial. He seeks someone to perform a final gesture, but the film resists clarity, ending ambiguously. Kiarostami’s minimalism is not apolitical but a language born under constraint. Since direct speech becomes dangerous, metaphor expands.
The Iranian New Wave cinema demonstrated that ideology shapes not only laws but aesthetics. The camera hesitates as society hesitates. The landscape feels empty because hope has thinned, yet within that quiet, something else persists: endurance.
Decades passed. Generations grew up within the structures of the Islamic Republic. Economic precarity intensified under sanctions. Class inequality deepened, and gender restrictions continued to regulate everyday existence. But repression accumulates. In 2022, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s morality police fractured something that had long been tightening. Officially detained for allegedly violating dress codes, her death ignited protests across the country and beyond. But the protests were not only about one law. They were about decades of bodily regulation, humiliation, and suppressed anger.
“Woman, life, freedom.”
The phrase echoed across cities as embodied demand. Women removed their hijabs publicly, cut their hair, and stood in defiance. Kurdish, Persian and other communities converged in shared resistance. The regime responded with arrests, violence, and internet blackouts. Today’s Iran is younger, technologically literate, and globally aware. Class intersects with gender oppression and economic suffocation, underlining existential frustration. Once again, art responds. Underground filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists continue to produce work without permission, documenting lives otherwise hidden. In recent films and digital expressions, claustrophobia becomes a metaphor. The underground film Critical Zone offers one such portrait of contemporary Tehran. Its protagonist, Amir, survives as a small-scale drug dealer, delivering drugs to an unlikely clientele: lost young men wandering highways, a yoga instructor, a palliative care patient who consumes hash cookies as a final relief, prostitutes, including a trans man, and a widow trying to save her son from addiction. Amir offers temporary escape in a city saturated with control. The film experiments with narrative fragmentation and metaphor, turning Tehran into a cyberpunk labyrinth of shadow and neon. Surveillance is implied, while claustrophobia is urban and existential.
I will conclude, not with a geopolitical analysis and a prediction of relief and hope. Since I have already used hope in this article. But with the story of Persepolis, not the film but the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, built under Darius I as a monumental statement of imperial order. With reliefs carved into stone depicting delegations from across the empire bringing tribute. In 330 BCE, Alexander burned Persepolis. Whether the fire was drunken revenge or calculated symbolism remains debated among historians. The flames consumed wood and collapsed structures, but they did not erase the city. The ruins remain. The carved figures still walk across stone staircases. Persepolis teaches us something about time that political analysis often forgets. Power structures appear immovable until they fracture. Ideologies present themselves as eternal until they weaken. Fire destroys monuments, but it does not annihilate memory. Modern Iran exists along a similar spectrum. It carries imperial history, cinematic brilliance, religious devotion, dessert and rebellion. To reduce it to headlines is to misunderstand its depth. The chronicles of Persepolis are not only about rise and fall. As Iran’s present is not the end of a story but a chapter in a much longer narrative, what appears immovable today will one day be carved into memory.
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Sergios Saropoulos is a philosopher and a writer with an extensive academic research knowledge in Philosophy and a career background in the field of Humanities and as an Educator. His work explores ideas and places where philosophy meets storytelling, history illuminates modern life and myth meets with personal reflection and collective reality.