Iranian cinema has become synonymous with its most significant rupture: the 1979 Revolution. This is true across popular, journalistic, and academic sources. Scores of monographs, articles, and festival programs insist upon pre- and post-revolutionary cinema as the most logical structure for Iranian film historiography. Books end abruptly in 1979; articles interrogate the long-term effects of the revolution on film production; and international film festivals tout the unexpected miracle of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Of course, one should not diminish the significance of the revolution to the film industry in Iran. Such a massive political event inevitably resulted in social and cultural corollaries that changed what it meant to make a film in the country. However, one might wonder what gets lost in this traditional periodization of Iranian film. What moments, movements, and measures slip through the cracks of this narrative, which so neatly snaps over a century of Iranian cinema neatly into two?

One such slippage is Kianoush Ayari’s Tāzeh-nafas-hā (The Newborns), a film which is neither pre-revolutionary nor post-revolutionary. It is just revolutionary. Here, I am not evoking the popular definition of the word “revolutionary” to mean that The Newborns is radically different than other films—although it may be. Rather, I mean that the film documents the revolution as it unfolded in real time. The Newborns, commissioned by state television in 1979 and shot on 16mm film, includes footage that the young director shot in Tehran during the spring of that year. Because, in the end, the documentary did not get screening permissions, it remains unfinished, a loose assemblage of shots and scenes that do not create a coherent narrative but instead capture a revolutionary zeitgeist in all of its excitement and possibility. In the film, the revolution is everywhere—in the snippets of theater productions condemning the Pahlavi monarchy; in the debates about whether the leadership of the revolution has followed through with its promises; in pop-up political satire comedy performances in parks; and in the lingering shots of Che Guevara posters for sale. In The Newborns, the whole city seems to have become a carnival, as Fereydoun Shahbazian’s playful soundtrack bounces alongside street vendors, photobooths, picnics, and skateboard races. And yet occasional images from Tehran’s slums serve as a somber rejoinder to the film’s festive tone, a reminder of the uncertain and perhaps devastating future that lies ahead.

It was likely the multitude of revolutionary perspectives that made The Newborns controversial by 1980. History remembers revolutions as singular, momentary events. The new order requires a coherent narrative about what the revolution was, and what it wasn’t. However, The Newborns refuses to pick just one side. Ayari captures a utopic moment when everything was unsettled and anything possible. That such a moment existed at all already unravels the tidiness of historical memory. The revolution didn’t just happen in an instance but rather meandered unevenly through time. Indeed, all of the revolution’s different political orientations occupy space on screen. They are represented in the books for sale, the impassioned debates between people on the sidewalk, and the impromptu speeches that gather large crowds. Other than hope for a better future, the ordinary people who appear in The Newborns agree on very little. Even the final scene—which includes images of people excitedly preparing for an upcoming election—leaves everything open to possibility. The film’s tenor of uncertainty and possibility could not accommodate the needs of state-run television at the time, which sought to consolidate the story of the Islamic Revolution.

Thus, for many years a rough cut of The Newborns collected dust in the archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). The director added the text “Summer 1979 in Tehran Today” to the opening frame before depositing it in the IRIB archives. As Tara Najd Ahmadi argues, although the film is largely unedited, this text gave some semblance of closure to the incomplete film, protecting it from possible misappropriation as raw footage. The text “Summer 1979 in Tehran Today” also keeps the film still in time, as Summer 1979 will always be today. This condition of stillness foreshadowed The Newborns’s fate as an artifact banished to the archive—unfinished, untouched, and unscreened—where it rested for decades still in time.

In the mid-2000s, The Newborns was discovered and smuggled out of the IRIB archive, nearly three decades after its original production. The film was digitized and entered into the informal DVD market in Tehran, where it began to attract the attention of cinephiles and movie enthusiasts. It was through this informal network of DVD shops that The Newborns became the subject of a documentary, Gomshodeh-hā (The Lost Ones, dir. Elham Hosseinzadeh, 2009). In The Lost Ones, filmmaker Elham Hosseinzadeh tracks down the film on DVD and watches it with its Kianoush Ayari, who hasn’t seen the footage in three decades. Their curiosity about the ordinary people in the film lead them on an adventure to track down one of its most memorable figures, a man named Morteza Peykari, whose comedic imitations of the biggest political and cultural figures attracted large audiences in Mellat Park. The odds are against the two filmmakers, since they have no idea whether Peykari still lives in the country. Through sheer determination and a bit of luck, Hosseinzadeh and Ayari are able to find Peykari, and the documentary ends with Peykari and Ayari returning to the same hillside in Mellat Park where Peykari had performed for a large audience in The Newborns. After living in Germany for several years, the soft-spoken Peykari now works as a salesman. As the two middle-aged men walk among the park’s grassy knolls, speaking barely above a whisper, we as viewers are left wondering whether they the lost ones of Hosseinzadeh’s title.

Shortly after the documentary, The Newborns began finding its way to video-streaming sites like YouTube and Aparat, reaching a wider but still limited viewership. It was the kind of film that one had to know about in order to find, and since most versions online had no subtitles, viewership was largely confined to Persian speakers. Its inclusion on the Docunight platform, thus, represents an important development for the film, signaling its importance to the history of Iranian cinema and also supplying meticulous English subtitles for greater accessibility. Now that the film has been brought to light, what new things about the history of cinema in Iran can it reveal? What previously obscured lessons does a revolutionary film like The Newborns teach us?

“Forty years ago? I drink tea and forget it after ten minutes!” Comments like this from Iranian citizens on their faded ability to recall their younger days come up in Seyed Reza Razavi’s Hidden (2019), as its team endeavours to unearth information about the Black Friday massacre of 8 September 1978 from first-hand witnesses. Such wry dismissals of the hold of a past spent in the thick of history’s paroxysms stem from more than the natural ravages of age, we sense. The personal dangers of memory linked with resistance and rocking the boat have engendered societal reticence and unspoken taboos.

Some might equate distance from the past with less trouble in the present, but a persistent female documentarian, Raya Nasiri, is unconvinced that burying the truth helps anybody. She tries to get to the bottom of who shot the 27 seconds of Super-8 footage that persists as evidence of the atrocity. Dozens of protesters against the Shah’s regime were shot on Jāleh Square in Tehran during declared martial law by troops, as a populist struggle to overthrow the pro-Western monarchy with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini played out. The footage of the panic and falling bodies, grainy but shockingly direct in its horror, has been used often, with little investigation into the source or how they came to be there filming that day. And what they felt when the live rounds began.

Ms. Nasiri eventually tracks down the cameraman: Mohammad Shoja’ee, who along with fellow student and amateur documentarian Ahmad Pasavand attended rallies to record them. She retraces their steps. They took the footage, unseen, from the window of a building they had forced their way into for refuge, and were narrowly missed by a stray gunshot that pierced the glass. Retrieving the bullet, which had lodged in the wall behind and was later plastered over in renovations, becomes a new exercise in tenacity, as she returns several times to the business. She tries to make the case for the importance of hammering into the facade to the managerial staff, who are wary of any controversial attention such a discovery might bring but humorously beleaguered by the relentless nuisance. Help and more revelations are slowly but surely teased out.

The intrepid students were not the only heroes in the production and preservation of the Super-8 footage. Fleeing the scene, and aware of the dire consequences of being caught with such an incriminating record in their possession, they entreated a female stranger to take their bag (which, unbeknown to her, contained the camera) and look after it for them. Returning three days later, they found she had travelled out of town for a prior appointment, keeping the camera with her despite the risk, “to keep safe what was entrusted to her.” Such selfless integrity in keeping one’s word is but one instance of the instrumental role women played in the Iranian revolution — a legacy of political consciousness that burns brightly today in Ms Nasiri and her active insistence on the witnessing and remembrance of lived experience.

It has happened more than once. While speaking with documentary filmmakers of a certain generation (Med Hondo, one of the greatest African filmmakers, for one) I have been told how much they would have loved to go to Iran in 1978 to film, document and report back on the revolution as it was happening – followed by an expression of regret, that they couldn’t get into the country. This conversational turn has been repeated often enough that when that great documentarian of our time, Jocelyne Saab, talked about wanting to shoot the Iranian revolution, I hastily and foolishly jumped ahead, saying “But you couldn’t get in, could you?” She gave me one of her calm smiles and replied: “I could, and I made a film about it – Iran, Utopia in the Making – which was shown on public television in Japan, Algeria, Sweden and Switzerland.”

I assumed I knew the images from that revolution, which changed the face and the fate of the country, but here was one more piece to be added to the unsolved puzzle of one of the most eventful chapters in the 20th century. Often erroneously called the “Islamic Revolution” (which defines its outcome more than its origins or development), the Iranian revolution was a leap into the unknown. Now we can shed a little more light on the period, thanks to the curatorial efforts undertaken to gather a wide range of films dealing with the subject – not least Jocelyne Saab’s film, in what I believe to be its online premiere.

Of course, Saab was only one of the handful of people who became the documentarians of the change. The revolution was not televised in its place of origin – where television was (and continues to be) owned and run by the state. Nevertheless, the masses were busy fighting it, seeing it from their rooftops, feeling it, smelling the burned tires and tear gas. Though state television suppressed footage of what was transpiring in Iran, it hardly stopped people from filming on Super 8mm and recording the sound of the chants on portable cassette recorders. This curatorial project brings together some of those scattered documents, which have been given coherence by filmmakers of talent and vision.

There is plenty to explore, including the rare presentation of works by the restless filmmakers (and fighters) Amir Naderi and Kianoush Ayyari – both Search One and The Newborns still convey an incredible sense of urgency. The programme starts with a flashback within a flashback, charting what went on in Iran in the decades before the revolution; giving viewers an understanding of the conditions which led to the uprising. The majority of the titles, however, deal with the turbulent months of 1978-79. What was not shown at the time needed to be revisited later, through compilation films such as the classic For Freedom (Hossein Torabi), which takes a view closer to that of the winning side, nonetheless a compelling one.

I must add that I appreciate the care with which the programmers have chosen to include so many perspectives. Even though the directions taken by the revolution after the groundswell of 1979 meant that much of the initial optimism quickly faded, the essence of a revolution can better be understood through the dialectic of contrasting images, which mirror the very dialectics which once fueled the political fervour itself.

Since the Iranian revolution was defined by the breaking up of an old image and the creation of a new one, cinema – at once a tool of truth and manipulation, and an institution to be rejected as corrupting by reactionaries of the revolution – became central to the revolutionary debate. A series of films presented here deal with this subject in different ways, my own Filmfarsi among them. Reza Razavi, in his Seconds of Lead, is particularly good at confronting the myth of cinema and the images of revolution. Digging up the past by searching through the history of recorded footage is a common approach among some of the more recent films made about the Iranian revolution. However, there are some unique examples such as Abbas Kiarostami’s First Case, Second Case whose take on the event is a metaphorical one.

Kiarostami’s film was already in production when the revolution began but plans had to be revised once the movement was successful. First Case, Second Case is a vivid document of the various sides engaged in the revolutionary discourse and its key dilemmas: betrayal or camaraderie; moral fortitude or group integrity; human rights or ideological goals? The fate of the interviewees should tell us how right Kiarostami was in his usual wisdom: some of them were imprisoned soon after because of their political ideas, and at least one was executed. Such was the fate of the revolution, which ended before it properly began.