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Car films, a subset of the road movie genre, offer a revealing lens through which to examine Iranian cinema — a body of work in which the automobile has become a defining space of storytelling. Many of the Iranian films that crossed borders into the wider world in the new millennium were road movies. The reasons are partly economic, as filmmakers tend to follow safe and viable paths to production, but there are also deep cultural dimensions to this cinematic tendency. Iranians share a long heritage of journeys in both the literal and figurative sense; in Persian culture, a journey does not necessarily mean moving from one place to another. This is clear in Kiarostami’s films, where any shift in ideas can constitute a journey — what poets call “a journey without legs and hands,” as Abbas Kiarostami himself has said. There are also more pressing reasons, related to the specific and legitimate space of expression that the car provides, which will be addressed in what follows.
Cars in Kiarostami's films; A haven for the artist and his characters
In Kiarostami’s career, which spanned from 1970 to 2016, women only appeared in his films in the later years. After presenting women in a timid role, and without a hijab in the 1977 film (The Report) «التقرير» , which was banned during the Islamic Revolution, Kiarostami returned to give women starring roles in the two films: (Shirin) «شيرين» in 2008 and (Ten) «عشرة» in 2002. The protagonist Maya Akbari discusses a range of topics with other women, including marriage, love, sex, religion, prostitution, and passion.
In Ten, Kiarostami abandons the aesthetics of outdoor photography, directing his camera inside the car in a manner that is not without awareness of the censor’s hidden eye. The title refers to the number of scenes filmed with two digital cameras mounted inside the vehicle — one focused on the driver, the protagonist, and the other on the passenger in the front seat. Each scene presents a personal conversation between the driver and the different women she encounters while traveling through Tehran. Despite Kiarostami’s well-known fascination with nature, expressed through long, uninterrupted outdoor shots, such images are absent here in favor of the intimate stories of his characters — stories he listens to carefully, offering a close-up examination of social problems and the status of women in Iranian society.
Kiarostami’s films tend to take their characters on journeys in which the car functions as an intimate space — a place where one is heard and tells one’s whole story. In (Taste of Cherry, 1997) «طعم الكرز», the protagonist Badii drives across the country throughout the film, asking strangers to help him commit suicide, without success. The car encloses two people in complete privacy; they do not look directly at each other, yet the conversation encompasses everything. One can look outward, but that does not mean the conversation is over.
The car metaphorically represents the inner state of the protagonist. Kiarostami has said: “The idea of spinning is part of the symbolism of the film. Going in circles means going nowhere, moving aimlessly, without justification, to reach anywhere. You have to go from one place to another, so this journey refers to the idea of stillness — everything that does not move, does not grow, does not increase, does not progress, is sick and doomed to death.” American critic Godfrey Cheshire notes that all of Kiarostami’s characters are in a state of motion, moving from one place to another, from one thing to another. During that motion, they do not stop asking questions about everything — questions not intended to elicit specific answers, but left suspended like an endless series of echoes.
The complexity arises, according to critic Michael Walsh, from the fact that such inquiry is generally left in a cloudy, unresolved state: (And Life Goes On, 1992) «وتستمر الحياة» ends with the car unable to climb a steep slope; in Taste of Cherry, the resolution of the narrative dissolves in a Brechtian gesture, as Kiarostami appears with the cast during filming; and in (The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999) «الريح سوف تحملنا», the documentary that was supposed to be filmed is never made.
Kiarostami does not burden his road films with the existential, psychological, and social symbolism that characterizes European road movies. Yet the ending of And Life Goes On, with the car unable to climb a high slope, achieves one of the most powerful, symbolic, and beautiful conclusions in his work: the car persists in climbing, slowly and steadily, on that arduous incline. The father-and-son journey through the landscape of an earthquake disaster transforms the viewer’s understanding of life and death, as the survivors insist on living in the face of tragedy. The driver’s determination to climb matches, with quiet perfection, the film’s own title — And Life Goes On.
In the end, the car frees Kiarostami from the censor’s authority, from his personal preoccupations, and from all burdens. “My inner life is denser in the car than in the house, where I do not stop for a minute and do not have time to think or contemplate. But as soon as you are in your car — putting on the seat belt or refraining from it — you are frozen in place, paralyzed. No one bothers you; no phone, no refrigerator, no one comes to see you. That is why I really work when I am behind the wheel: it is the office I have, an incredibly special place, like a small house, where there is nothing extra or unnecessary. And there is the enormous screen that offers an endless cinematic journey,” he says.
Cars in Jafar Panahi's films: Questions of Freedom and Tyranny
With Iran’s transition from the rule of the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to the era of Khomeini, artists and filmmakers were regarded not only as immoral and dangerous but as ideologically threatening — a perception that forced filmmakers in the post-revolution period to develop a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. The car became one such language. There is a strong and consistent link in Jafar Panahi’s films between cinema, the car, and freedom in the political sense: the car in his work roams freely on Iranian roads and penetrates forbidden spaces. His films emerge as explorations of freedom and individual identity within a suffocating public sphere. Symbolically, the car enables movement in a social and political sense, creating spaces for communication and dialogue between oppressed individuals. Unlike Kiarostami, the outer world in Panahi’s films is rendered almost entirely through the narratives of his passengers — a constraint that reflects the very conditions of censorship he faced.
Jafar Panahi, the dissident artist and political prisoner, dedicated his life to a form of art the state deemed illegitimate. Like many dissident filmmakers in Iran, he has focused a great deal of his work on women’s stories. He began his open opposition to the regime with (The Circle, 2000) «الدائرة», a film whose portrayal of the state’s repression of women was stark and unflinching — following recently released female prisoners who discover they have merely exchanged one prison for a larger one outside.
In (Taxi, 2015) «تاكسي» — made in defiance of the twenty-year ban imposed on Panahi by the Tehran regime, which had placed him under house arrest, forbidden him from leaving Iran, conducting interviews, or engaging in any cinematic activity — Panahi himself plays the driver of a taxi navigating through Tehran, picking up random passengers along the way. Every conversation converges on a critique of Iranian reality: the restriction of freedoms and the condition of women, themes that connect directly to his earlier films, including (Offside, 2006) «تسلل», in which girls passionate about football disguise themselves to enter a stadium, and The Circle. The film ends, however, when two men — either secret police or ordinary criminals — break into the car and steal it.
Panahi continued his road journey in (Three Faces, 2018) «ثلاثة وجوه», traveling to discover the fate of a young woman, played by Marzieh Rezaei, who was prevented by her family from pursuing her dream of acting and forced instead into marriage. Betrayed by the actress Behnaz Jafari, who could have helped her but did not, the young woman apparently commits suicide in a video clip. In the course of his search, Panahi encounters another outcast: a dancer from the era of the Shah, isolated from society by both her village and the state, imprisoned within her community because she is seen as a source of shame.
During his years of enforced isolation, Panahi produced a series of films across different cinematic modes: (This Is Not a Film, 2011) (هذا ليس فيلمًا), (Closed Curtain, 2013) «ستائر مغلقة», (Taxi, 2015), (Three Faces, 2018), and his most recent film, (No Bears, 2022) «لا يوجد دببة». Despite the authorities’ unrelenting harassment, it can be said that his works are powerful not in spite of censorship alone, but because of the creative resistance it has provoked — a resistance that continues.