A free society is inconceivable without women’s freedom‹ says a Kurdish conviction expressed in the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî). A union of three words has become the leitmotif of the feminist liberation movement in Iran, which formed a year ago after the violent murder of the Kurdish Iranian woman Jîna (Mahsā) Amīnī in September 2022 in order to overcome the social prison walls of fear, punishment and repression by means of a decentralized, leaderless movement. People from different social classes, generations and ethnic groups – Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Baloch – joined the women’s resistance movement.  The women’s struggle against the colonization of their bodies became an inclusive people’s movement demanding basic rights to life. Iranian film history (before and after 1979) not only tells us a pre-history of this struggle, but also it has always been part of it. 

My article takes the ongoing revolution as an opportunity to tell Iranian film history as a cross-generational story of resistant women behind and in front of the camera – women, who liberated themselves (and each other) with headstrong cinematic practices, tactics and aesthetics. As will be shown from films before the revolution to the present time, rediscovering Iranian film history as a history of women’s resistance means, first of all, breaking with the clichés and trademarks to which the ‘new Iranian cinema’ was confined by international distribution and festival policies after the Islamic Revolution (1979) and especially after the Iran-Iraq War (190-88).