Eastern Boys and Failed Heroes: Iranian Cinema in the World’s Orbit

Abstract:This article revisits the foundational events of 1969, an auspicious year for prerevolutionary Iranian cinema, and the early career of one of its main directors, Masoud Kimiai. It examines two of his orphan projects, a sponsored film for adolescents and a major Iran-Hollywood collaboration, to suggest an alternative historiography of Iranian cinema during a shift toward greater ambition for its commercial films and increased institutional support for its new wave. These forgotten works call for a method, in contrast to the constricting histories of a handful of groundbreaking features, that attends to this period’s creative volatility, its ambivalent collaborations, and its competing models of globalized cinema.