Kaveh Mousavi’s Top 10 Iranian Films

1. About Elly (2009) – Asghar Farhadi

And now, we’re up to number one. This is the second film of Iran’s international superstar, Asghar Farhadi, on this list. While much less famous abroad than A Separation, I’d argue this one is far superior. In many ways A Separation is an imitation of About Elly (and I don’t mean that as a criticism), but About Elly is the much more nuanced one, while A Separation is very obvious in its themes.  About Elly can be considered a simple movie, and the more you rewatch it, the more and more you peel off its layers.

The story is about a group of young people travelling to the north of Iran to spend their vacation there.  During their holiday, they plan to set up Elly with a young man who has recently divorced and returned to Iran from Germany, where he had migrated. One day Elly is lost at sea, and her friends realize that she was already engaged to a man, and she had hidden this travel from her fiancé and family. Trying to cover up for her, the people are caught in a web of lies spun by no one but themselves.

Again, most people consider the film a didactic film about lying, but to me the movie is a modern Greek tragedy, as it’s about the inevitability of lying and the sheer complexity of right and wrong. The movie never judges its characters, but its labyrinth of moral dilemmas with unanswerable questions deepens your appreciation for the difficulty of ethics more than any boringly didactic morality tale. Watch this movie many times.

In my opinion, About Elly is not only the best Iranian movie ever made, it contains the best line ever written in an Iranian script. When Elly asks the character Shahab Hosseini why he divorced his German wife, he says, “One day she woke up and told me [next line is German].”  Elly asks, “What does that mean?” And he replies, “A bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness.”

And with that, this list comes to an end.