The Brick and the Mirror · reception & legacy

How The Brick and the Mirror has been received, argued over, and remembered.

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.