Iranian films have been the subject of much critical and scholarly attention over the past several decades, and Iranian filmmakers are mainstays of international film festivals. Yet most of the attention has been focused on a small segment of Iranian film production: auteurist art cinema. Iranian Cinema in a Global Context, on the other hand, takes account of the wide range of Iranian cinema, from popular youth films to low budget underground films. The volume also reassesses the global circulation of Iranian art cinema, looking at its reception at international festivals, in university curricula, and at the Academy Awards. A final theme of the volume explores the intersection between politics and film, with essays on post-Khatami reform influences, representations of ineffective drug policies, and the representation of Jewish characters in Iranian film. Taken together, the essays in this volume present a new definition of the field of Iranian film studies, one that engages global media flows, transmedia interaction, and a heterogeneous Iranian national cinema.

"Highly original and timely, this book helps us understand Iranian cinema from many perspectives. The authors in this volume don’t shy away from the most difficult questions that have arisen in the past few decades, and seek to complicate received discourses about Iranian film." -- Pardis Mahdavi, Pomona College, USA

Peter Decherney is Professor of Cinema Studies and English and Director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet and Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. Blake Atwood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the coordinator of the Persian Language Program and an affiliate of the Program in Comparative Literature.