Sightlines · reception
How The Brick and the Mirror was received
1966 · Ebrahim Golestan · The Brick and the Mirror on Sightlines
The arc
Barely seen and coolly received in 1960s Iran — too long, too bleak, too talky for a market built on pop melodrama — it's now routinely called a founding stone of the Iranian New Wave, with 2010s restorations and screenings (Rotterdam, MoMA) finally giving it a global audience.
What’s debated
The recurring fight is over primacy and pace: does the Iranian New Wave really start here rather than with The Cow, and are those long real-time monologue scenes hypnotic or a slog?
Its footprint
Its neon-lit, night-crawling Tehran is one of cinema's great preserved images of the pre-revolution city, and the proverb in the title — what the young see in a mirror, the old see in the raw brick — does double duty as the film's calling card.
Where it stands
A canon-climbing deep cut: the 'you have to go back to this one' film for cinephiles tracing Iranian cinema past Kiarostami to its source.
Did you know? The veiled woman who leaves the baby in the taxi is Forough Farrokhzad — the legendary modernist Persian poet and Golestan's partner — in a rare screen appearance; reportedly only that opening scene existed in script form when shooting began, with the rest developed as they went.