Iranian Cinema Before and After the Revolution: Three Documentaries by Jamsheed Akrami (DVD)

Iranian Cinema Before and After the Revolution is an illuminating two-disc set that includes a trilogy of documentaries by film scholar Jamsheed Akrami, Friendly Persuasion (2000) gives an overarching portrait of Iranian cinema through interviews with three generations of Iranian directors - from New Wave visionaries (Abbas Kiarostami) to post-revolutionaries (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) and the third generation (Jafar Panahi). The Lost Cinema (2007) digs deeper into the Iranian New Wave, which blossomed as a counter-cinema in the 1970s and ended up banned due to the severely restrictive censorship codes imposed by the Islamic government after the 1979 Revolution. A Cinema of Discontent (2013) focuses on contemporary censorship codes by interviewing twelve filmmakers (from Asghar Farhadi to Dariush Mehrjui) about how they cope with or circumvent these restrictions. Taken together, along with the bonus short film A Walk with Kiarostami (2003), these films provide a deep and wide-ranging exploration of a courageous and fiercly creative national cinema.