MADRID – Iranian director Jafar Panahi recently added another international accolade to his name by winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with It Was Just an Accident. 

This award reaffirms his prominent position within contemporary Iranian cinema, which for decades has managed to carve out a space on the global stage. Yet, alongside the celebration arises an uncomfortable question: to what extent do these films, praised in the West, perpetuate an orientalist vision that caters to Western audiences’ expectations and stereotypes about Iran?

Iranian cinema and Western stereotypes

Iranian cinema has become a cultural phenomenon that transcends borders and accumulates prestigious awards. However, Iran—as a Muslim country and part of West Asia—remains subject to simplified and reductive portrayals, especially in Western media. This often negative and monolithic image finds repetition of its own prejudices in certain awarded productions.

Directors like Panahi, Asghar Farhadi—who won an Oscar in 2017 for The Salesman—and the late Abbas Kiarostami have been internationally celebrated as the foremost voices of Iranian cinema. However, many of their films seem, consciously or not, to respond to an expected narrative: one of social drama, oppression, and cultural contradiction. This formula, while recognizable and powerful, risks confining Iranian reality within a limited framework tailored to Western tastes.

Regardless of the directors’ intentions, the result is a partial representation that obstructs the plurality of voices within Iran. This phenomenon opens a crucial debate about the limits of cultural representation in a globalized world, where media power circuits and dominant ideologies shape which stories are told—and how.

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall shed light on this issue by analyzing how media constructs meaning within political and ideological contexts. According to Hall, messages do not hold fixed truths; they are encoded and decoded under the conditions of dominant power and culture. Thus, ideology guides both the production and consumption of meaning, shaping representations that tend to favor hegemonic interests.

In this context, the recognition of Panahi and other Iranian filmmakers in the West reveals a profound contradiction: while their artistic talent is lauded, their works often legitimize a fragmented and biased vision that aligns more with Western political and cultural interests than with Iranian reality. Far from offering a faithful and pluralistic representation, these films reinforce simplistic stereotypes that distort Iran’s social and political complexity, inadvertently aligning with an external discourse that seeks to perpetuate the image of the country as a conflict-ridden and backward space.

The international applause thus becomes part of a symbolic game where Iranian cinema is reduced to a problematic exoticism, contributing little to a genuine understanding of the country and its diversity.

Orientalism and its legacy

The influential intellectual Edward Said emphasized the importance of the mechanism and manner by which the East is represented to the West through various portrayals. In his seminal work Orientalism (1978), Said argued that artistic productions are often influenced by colonial discourses and that these representations serve as tools for Western domination over the peoples of the East and the Middle East, generating a permanent division between East and West.

Said did not dispute the absolute truthfulness of these portrayals but maintained that most serve to uphold specific colonial and political objectives.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, an even stronger tendency emerged to represent the Islamic world from an Islamophobic perspective, aiming to create and reinforce mental stereotypes and naturalize a negative vision of the Middle East in global public opinion. The image of Muslim peoples in Western media became reduced to clichés portraying them as “hypocritical, deceitful, and even threatening” societies—a simplification that, regrettably, has also permeated cultural productions.

The role of self-orientalization

In this context, Ali Behdad, a leading critic of modern orientalism, has devoted much of his scholarship to analyzing not only the representation of the East by the West but also the role of local artistic productions in constructing their own identity. Behdad coined the term “self-orientalization” to describe how artists and filmmakers from the region, including Iran, reproduce certain Western stereotypes in their works, often to gain recognition and legitimacy within the global circuit.

According to Behdad, the way the West presents and represents the East and Islam decisively influences the formation of identity among Easterners and Muslims. This dynamic creates a complex and sometimes contradictory relationship in which self-representation is mediated by external expectations and demands. Cultural identity is thus shaped under the pressure of an external gaze that defines which aspects are “visible” and which remain invisible.

Applying this perspective to the mentioned Iranian directors, it is evident that despite their claims of authentic storytelling, Panahi, Farhadi, and Kiarostami have presented images of Iran that not only fail to break with stereotypes but contribute to reinforcing them, albeit unintentionally. Two recurring themes strongly emerge in much of their work: women and Iranian society.

These elements tend to be constructed through images that align closely with Western stereotypes about Iran, portraying a society marked by repression, trauma, and silence. These portrayals fit a narrative framework that ultimately corresponds to what the West expects to see in Iranian cinema.

A clear example is Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016), where women are depicted through the stereotype of the passive victim, trapped in a context of inequality and violence. This image, frequent in Western media, reinforces the view of Islam as an “uncivilized, illogical, and discriminatory” system, in contrast to a “civilized, enlightened West” that champions gender equality.

This simplistic binary serves to maintain a sharp division that legitimizes hegemonic discourses while delegitimizing the internal complexities of Muslim societies.

The price of global recognition

The messages conveyed through the films of Panahi, Farhadi, and other Iranian directors—whether through their characters’ appearance and behavior or the images they project of Iranian society—can be understood as manifestations of the colonial discourse in its contemporary form. The perception and interpretation of the “Oriental self” in these works mirrors that of the “Oriental other” portrayed by the West.

This process results in the repetition and perpetuation of clichés and stereotypes that, far from challenging, consolidate a monolithic and reductive image of Iran and its complex society.

Ultimately, the Iranian cinema most acclaimed in the West reveals not only the technical and narrative skill of its directors but also their submission to a global cultural market that conditions and limits the diversity of their narratives. The persistence of self-orientalization in the works of Panahi, Farhadi, and Kiarostami exposes an uncomfortable paradox: to gain international prestige, these filmmakers end up reproducing a reductive and stereotyped vision of Iran, prioritizing a complacent gaze that feeds Western prejudices rather than challenging dominant narratives. This conformity to external demands is no mere artistic accident but a conscious choice that compromises the real complexity and plurality of Iranian society.