Sightlines · reception

How The Cow was received

1969 · Dariush Mehrjui · The Cow on Sightlines

The arc

Banned at home by the Shah's censors — rural poverty didn't fit the image of a modernizing 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.