In 1986, as the Iran – Iraq war raged on, Bahram Beyzaie completed a film that would define his career and challenge Iranian self-image for decades to come.
Few filmmakers have loved their country as deeply or as tenderly, as Bahram Beyzaie loved Iran. A founding father of the Iranian New Wave, Beyzaie emerged, alongside Dariush Mehrjui and Masoud Kimiai, as one of the most culturally significant directors of his generation. His films – a pick-and-mix of Persian folklore, symbolism and allegory – favoured stories of outcasts on fraught journeys toward societal acceptance. Beyzaie, himself a member of the persecuted Bahá’í faith, was able to draw on his own direct experiences of exclusionary politics to become a rare, and necessary, champion for minority resistance. Nowhere is this clearer than in his 1986 film, Bashu, the Little Stranger.
Bashu stands as a sobering antidote to Iran’s state-supported “Sacred Defence Cinema”, a genre of war films commissioned during the Iran-Iraq war that attempted to reframe martyrdom (particularly child martyrdom) as a divine act of nationalist self-sacrifice. Beyzaie instead turns his camera toward a tragedy of displacement, uncovering an Iran far more divided than wartime propaganda dared to acknowledge. In response, the Ministry of Culture banned Bashu from screening publicly for almost three years. “At that time,” Beyzaie explained in a 2025 interview, “any word that did not glorify the war was met with threats and was strictly forbidden.”
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When the film was finally released in 1989, it was hailed as a humanist masterpiece, with a 2018 poll of Iranian critics declaring it the greatest Iranian film ever made. Now, 40 years later, at the dawn of a new conflict, Bashu has re-emerged – thanks to a timely restoration that premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival – as an urgent and enduring work that not only explores the perennial perils of war but also the complexities of Iran’s national identity.
The film follows the eponymous Bashu (played by Adnan Afravian), a traumatised Arab-Iranian boy, as he flees his home in Khuzestan after being orphaned by an Iraqi bombardment. He arrives as a stowaway in Mazandaran, near the Caspian Sea, where he encounters Na’i (Susan Taslimi) and her children who reluctantly take him in. Here, Bashu struggles to assimilate, unable to understand Na’i’s Gilaki tongue, while she, in turn, remains confounded by his ethnicity. Confronted with an alien landscape and a radically different culture that, quite literally, attempts to wash away his very existence, Bashu cannot help but ask: “Am I still in Iran?”
As Beyzaie’s film unfolds, a quiet, surreal dismantling of Persian ethnocentrism begins to take shape – by spotlighting two marginalised communities, neither of whom speak Farsi as their first language, Bashu offers an alternative vision of Iran, not as a nation-state but rather a polycultural civilisation in denial. “Iranians have become alienated from one another,” Beyzaie noted when talking about the film, a divide that is evident through the eyes of Bashu, who arrives in his own country as if he has crossed a border.
Today, with war once again uprooting millions of Iranians, these interminable divisions have migrated onto a global stage. In the diaspora, for example, monarchists clash with pro-régime voices, each claiming to speak for a singular “Iranian people” – precisely the illusion Beyzaie sought to dismantle. Consequently, those who fall outside of these competing narratives have found their ‘Iranian-ness’ increasingly called into question, as if one’s identity is entirely contingent on ideology. In ‘The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran’, Professor Ali M. Ansari, drawing on the work of Mohammad Ali Foroughi, opposes this form of cultural hegemony and suggests that Iranians are, in fact, united not by language, ethnicity, or political allegiance, but through shared histories, myths and a land that has survived millennia of invasions and internal strife. It is this idea that resides at the very heart of Bashu too.
In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Bashu, haunted by the spectral zār (a harmful wind associated with spirit possession beliefs in southern Iran) of fighter jets, leaps over a burning flame and recites from a schoolbook, in formal Persian: “Iran is our homeland. We belong to the same country. We are the children of Iran.”
This moment, amplified in close-up by Afravian’s heartbreaking performance, sees Bashu turn the official tongue of his own marginalisation against itself. In 1935, Reza Shah’s régime institutionalised ‘standard Persian’ (Farsi) as the country’s sole language, suppressing all others, including Bashu’s own Arabic. It was a policy of coercive homogenisation that the Islamic Republic inherited under the guise of national unity. By reciting the state’s own words back at the camera, at them, Bashu does not surrender to bureaucracy; he weaponises it, using a language of assimilation to assert his most basic right to exist. It is Beyzaie questioning the artificiality and futility of a nation’s attempt to codify culture. Instead, he implies that Iranian identity is rooted in the physical, in a mythos that is felt: Bashu’s encounter with zār, his leaping over the fire — a ritual ancient enough to predate Islam, let alone the idea of the modern nation-state. These actions represent a connection to the country that is far stronger and expansive than anything found in a textbook or a tweet.
We see this more explicitly with Na’i, who occupies a space of mythic matriarchy. She embodies Beyzaie’s version of Anahita, the ancient Indo-Iranian fertility goddess who presided over the natural world long before any empire formalised her worship, pre-dating even Zoroastrianism. Throughout the film, Na’i converses with scavenging crows, grunting boars, and even whispers to the wind; like Anahita, she exists on the periphery of a past and present Iran. These beats work to detach her “Iranian-ness” from language or ethnicity, situating it within a more primordial, intimate connection to the land itself.
Bashu’s Iran, then, is omnipresent; it lurks amid the mud-brick temples of Chogha Zanbil just as much as it does in the humid, mist-choked Hyrcanian forests or the exquisite mosques of Isfahan. Through Beyzaie’s lens, Iranian identity is elemental, built into the ecology, into the landscape, and the air. It cannot, nor should it, be defined by lawmakers or taken away by reckless bombing campaigns. To be a child of Iran is to belong to its soil, to its animals, and its ancient ghosts.
Yet Beyzaie would ultimately be estranged from the very Iran his work sought to reclaim, passing away in self-imposed exile in California last December. As the legendary filmmaker Asghar Farhadi observed, how can “the most culturally Iranian of all Iranians” have died so far from Iran? As a silver lining, he at least did not live to witness the destruction of cherished heritage sites or the myriad of massacres and deaths that were to come for many of his compatriots whom he loved so dearly.
His legacy, however, extends far beyond borders and lifetimes, and not only through Bashu. A scholar of Persianate history and literature as well as a playwright, Beyzaie worked across theatre and mythology; at one point, he was known as the “Shakespeare of Iran”. Dr Saeed Talajooy notes in his obituary that Beyzaie stands among the most influential figures in Iranian cultural production, alongside Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Sadegh Hedayat.
In recent years, many of his other films have also undergone significant restoration, among them The Stranger and the Fog and The Ballad of Tara, the latter of which was screened as part of Ehsan Khoshbakht’s “Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave” series at the Barbican. These rebirths return Beyzaie’s work to the community at a time when his stories feel more poignant and important than ever before.
For me, the enduring power of Beyzaie’s cinema lies in his absolute refusal to simplify what it means to be not only an Iranian, but a person. As political dogma and sectarianism continue to fragment our own definitions of self, his films serve as vital mirrors, reaffirming our right to belong and offering a sanctuary where identity is measured through love and compassion as opposed to rigid conformity.
Na’i’s ultimate choice to take Bashu in as her own child, and her husband’s eventual embrace of that, is a gesture of care that offers audiences something increasingly rare and hard to come by: hope. If nothing else, Bashu, the Little Stranger cuts through the desensitising, violent haze of social media coverage and gives a far more human understanding of the complexities of what it means to be an individual.
