Cinematic Courtrooms: Law and Courts in Iran’s Post-Revolution Cinema

This article focuses on how courts are represented in Iran’s contemporary cinema. Exploring Iranian movies made since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and more precisely movies of the past 25 years, reveals a concrete transition in the representation of courts and law: moving from an idealistic to a more critical view, and eventually to a realistic perspective. This shift can be understood as a response and an adjustment to the political and social changes in contemporary Iran. The ‘idealistic’ representation of courts portrayed them as a sacred place with a judge presiding over all parties and incidents, tackling dilemmas in the most righteous way and serving infallible justice. This portrayal is found most frequently in movies of the 1990s. The next decade saw the emergence of a critical perspective that included themes such as freedom of speech, women’s rights, or modern Iranian family structures; when it came to the law and the role of courts, movies attacked the legal system. This ‘oppositional representation’ would, for example, portray the judge as ignorant of certain facts, depicting the parties as desperate and helpless against the court, as well as other factors that prevent justice from being served or, even worse, cause the defendant to fall victim to the legal system. Almost simultaneously, in contrast, ‘realistic’ cinematic courtrooms are depicted in another set of movies, in which justice is achieved only to some extent. In this representation, the bench is neither sacred, nor is the judge omniscient, with parties capable of keeping the whole truth from him and of manipulating the court’s decision. Each of these representations requires a different set of narrative structures. This article shows how these narratives have emerged in Iranian cinema. It uses Vladimir Propp’s model for analysing narratives, according to which each narrative is fractionalized into ‘characters’ and ‘functions.’ Using Propp’s model, this article identifies three major cinematic narratives involving courts, namely the ‘idealistic narrative,’ the ‘oppositional narrative,’ and the ‘realistic narrative.’ The article also investigates the impact of social developments in the audiences’ perception of the law as they move away from unreal understandings of justice towards more nuanced and critical ones.