This volume brings together scholarship from both established scholars and early career academics to provide fresh insights and new research on the cinema of Iran. The book is organised around eight broad themes including cinema before and after the revolution, stylistic innovation, documentary, gender, and genre. Encompassing a diverse range of methodological approaches and disciplinary frameworks including film studies, cultural studies, and political economy, each chapter is a self-contained study on a specific topic engaging with the national and transnational history of Iranian cinema which combined provide readers with original new insights into Iranian film and filmmakers, from fiction films to art house and popular cinema. The Handbook includes analysis of the works of established filmmakers such as Bahram Beyzaie, Rakhshan Banetemad, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as well as the output of emerging voices such as Ida Panahandeh and Shahram Mokri. Covering well-known topics as well as cutting edge ones such the sonic and visual manifestations of the urban environment in Iranian films, this book is a vital resource for understanding Iran and its unique cinematic culture.

Michelle Langford is Associate Professor of film studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research focuses on the cinemas of Iran and Germany. She is the author of Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance (2019) and has published on Iranian cinema in leading film studies journals including Camera Obscura, Screen and Screening the Past.


Maryam Ghorbankarimi is Assistant Professor in film studies at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of A Colourful Presence: The Evolution of Women's Representation in Iranian Cinema. Her edited volume on seminal Iranian filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad, ReFocus: The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad was published in 2021. Her current research is on transnational cinema and culture, specifically the representation of gender and sexuality in Middle Eastern cinema.

Zahra Khosroshahi is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto (SSHRC). She is currently working on her forthcoming monograph Iranian Women Filmmakers: A Cinema of Resistance. Zahra's research explores how film challenges systems of power, and how filmmaking specifically functions as a form of resistance in Iran. She completed her doctorate at the University of East Anglia, UK, working on prominent Iranian filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad's cinema as a gateway into important discussions around gender, femininity, and the taboo.