The Cow · reception & legacy
1969 · Dariush Mehrjui
How The Cow has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Banned at home by the Shah's censors — rural poverty didn't fit the image of a modernising Iran — it was smuggled to the 1971 Venice Film Festival, won the FIPRESCI critics' prize, and is now routinely cited as the founding film of the Iranian New Wave.
Its footprint
Its strangest cultural legacy: Ayatollah Khomeini reportedly saw it on TV and approved, an endorsement widely credited with helping Iranian cinema survive after the 1979 revolution — a banned-by-one-regime, blessed-by-the-next story no other film can match.
Where it stands
The 'start here' film of Iranian cinema — the acknowledged ancestor of Kiarostami, Farhadi and the whole New Wave, a must-see for anyone tracing that lineage.
★ Did you know? The Shah's government had partly funded the film, then banned it — and when it finally screened at Venice in 1971, it reportedly played without proper subtitles and still won the international critics' prize.