Chess of the Wind · reception & legacy
1976 · Mohammad Reza Aslani
How Chess of the Wind has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Booed at the 1976 Tehran film festival (where a botched screening reportedly showed the reels out of order), then banned after the 1979 revolution and presumed lost for decades — until the negatives turned up in a Tehran junk shop in 2014. After a Scorsese-backed World Cinema Project restoration premiered at Cannes Classics in 2020, it was reborn as a masterpiece of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema.
What's debated
The gentle Letterboxd quarrel: is it truly one of the great rediscovered films, or does the irresistible lost-and-found legend do some of the heavy lifting for its stately pacing?
Its footprint
It's become the poster child for the 'lost film found in a junk shop' story — the rediscovery tale gets retold almost as often as the film gets watched, and its candlelit mansion imagery draws constant Visconti comparisons from critics.
Where it stands
A canon climber of the purest kind — from banned and vanished to a fixture on best-of-Iranian-cinema lists and a Letterboxd 'lost masterpiece' favourite since its 2020 restoration.