US-Israel War On Iran: A Civilisation At Stake

On a warm, sunny afternoon, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi drives through Tehran, with Indian filmmaker and researcher Sreemoyee Singh filming him in his car. This cinematic moment from And, Towards Happy Alleys (2023) is designed like a matryoshka doll—a film within a film within a film. One is reminded of Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), which, in turn, inspired his protégé Panahi to make Taxi (2015) as a tribute to his work. Both these films reflect on questions of state oppression and curbing of basic rights, dignity and freedom of citizens in Iran, among other things, while taking place almost entirely inside a car. In both films, the car signifies independence and modernity, while granting a relative degree of safety to its occupants to voice their opinions without being heard or surveilled. Singh embeds this legacy within her frame. As she turns the camera on the filmmaker, he speaks on why his films are banned in Iran, which began with The Circle (2000), and why he must continue to make the films he does.

“You know, even after all this trouble, I never considered myself to be a political person. I thought of myself as an artist,” Panahi says. “But I couldn’t ignore the political situation in my country. I mean when three million people come out to protest in the streets, I can’t close my eyes and say it’s not my problem. It becomes my problem even if I’m not a political person. I must react to it,” he states. He further explains the restrictions implemented on him by the state and the perpetual threat of imprisonment looming over his future. He recalls how the imposition of the ban on filmmaking nearly pushed him to take his life, after which he swore that he would continue to create cinema, no matter what the consequences.

It is in such circumstances that most artists and filmmakers like Panahi have been creating art for a long time in Iran. Mohammad Rasoulof, another filmmaker, was arrested multiple times in the last decade and ultimately forced to flee to Europe in 2024, after being handed out an eight-year prison sentence, which notably involved his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024). In 2025, Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghadam received a suspended jail sentence of 14 months for their film My Favourite Cake (2024). Most recently, Mehdi Mahmoudian, the co-writer of the Oscar-nominated It Was Just an Accident (2025), spent 17 days in prison in February 2026, for signing a statement condemning the former Islamic Republic leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the regime’s brutal crackdown on protestors. Less than a fortnight after his release on bail, Israel and the US began a war against Iran.

More than a month later, the war shows no signs of relenting. Nearly 3,500 Iranians have already lost their lives in the current conflict, including a large number of civilians and children. While many believe that the intent behind this war is largely geo-political one-upmanship, this has not held back state leaders from justifying their actions in cultural and religious terms. Sara Hassani, a Canadian-Iranian assistant professor of political science and gender studies at the Providence College, US, explains how “all three adversaries are invoking ultra conservative and religious nationalist ideologies that can be said to have a cultural dimension.” She states, “In the United States, where the administration has the support of MAGA’s Christian nationalism, this open ultraconservative nationalism is explicitly invoked by the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s crusade rhetoric; in Israel, which is now ruled by its most conservative administration ever, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet now consists of key Otzma Yehudit politicians like Ben-Gvir who boasts ultraconservative Kahanite views; this, while the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of the world’s only theocratic and fascist dictatorships, defines itself as a harbinger of “Islamic Revolution.” However, Hassani believes that it is important to recognise that at the heart of this conflict lie imperial interests from all directions.

Another Iranian academic based in the US, explains (on the condition of anonymity) how this cultural rhetoric is also unfolding internally in Iran. “The Iranian regime has long portrayed its tensions with the West, especially since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as part of an ongoing cultural struggle. At the same time, some opposition groups also adopt a cultural lens, though differently: they see Iran as distinct from the Islamic Republic and locate “authentic” Iranian identity in the country’s past, including the Pahlavi era, which could be liberated by foreign intervention,” she says.

There is a critical distinction, however, in how these dyna­mics are interpreted and shaped within the realm of cinema. In the US, the rhetoric of ‘moral righteousness’ has been capitalised frequently by Hollywood to portray the wars that America has waged across the world as “necessary and just”. While most of these films continue to portray the natives of countries like Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan as “savages” who can only speak the language of brutal violence, the conflicted interiority, the human cost of war and the spirit of sacrifice is framed almost exclusively from the American perspective. Furthermore, technical finesse, polished aesthetics and the star power of globally renowned actors ensure that these films continue to get legitimacy and recognition through prestigious award ceremonies. The 2012 espionage thriller Argo is a crucial case in point, which depicts the covert mission of extracting American workers taken hostage at the US embassy in Iran in 1979 after the Islamic Revolution. Loosely based on real-life events, the Oscar-winning film focuses on the operation and the dramatic heroics of the US offi­cers and agents involved in the mission, but spares little time in historically contextualising the political dynamics between the two countries during the period, painting the entire Iranian population in a single, brutish stroke.

Iranian cinema, in contrast, has, over the decades, effectively evolved a film language that has broken through the globally popular and influential framework of Hollywood’s storytelling, both in terms of stylistic form as well as content. As Hassani points out, “Iranian cinema is an art form born of severe censorship and state repression and it has responded by becoming both a crucial site of internal dissent and a powerful counter-narrative to the political stereotypes that reduce Iran and its culture to a threat or abstraction.” While most mainstream directors of Hollywood have remained consistently uncritical of American foreign invasions in their white saviour complex, Iranian filmmakers on the other hand have embedded intricate critical viewpoints on their society within their narratives.

For instance, one can look at Persepolis (2007) by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, based on Satrapi’s 2003 autobiographical graphic novel with the same name. The story of Satrapi’s own life is also the narrative of a people who have encountered disappointment with their own leadership as well as foreign intervention repeatedly through the decades, yet have kept their hope and struggle for liberation alive. The charm of this brilliantly animated story lies in its astute political reading of the predicament of Iranians that resonates even within today’s context. In a telling scene within the film, Satrapi recounts the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, when the latter country was still emerging from the churning of the Islamic revolution. Satrapi narrates, “The revolution and the massive purges from within the army had left us extremely vulnerable. Under the pretext of fighting the foreign enemy, the Iranian government exterminated the domestic enemy: in other words, the former opponents of the Shah. Arrests and executions became common practice.” In another scene when Satrapi returns to Iran from Austria nearly a decade later, after the Iran-Iraq war had concluded, she expresses hope to her father about being able to leave the trauma behind. Her father, however, sees it otherwise. “People don’t even know why we were at war in the first place,” he says. “The West sold weapons to both sides. Unfortunately, we were stupid enough to go along with their cynical game,” he rues. “Right before the ceasefire, the regime became alarmed because an opposition army had entered Iran through the Iraqi border. The government feared that the thousands of political prisoners would become a serious threat, so they came up with a solution that would solve their problem, once and for all. The government gave the prisoners a choice: they could renounce their revolutionary ideals and pledge allegiance to the regime, in which case they would serve their full prison sentence, or they would be executed. The majority of prisoners chose the second option.”

These sombre scenes from Persepolis that talk of Iran’s history from almost four decades ago remain strikingly similar in the contemporary scenario. On the question of how Iranian dissidents perceive the US-Israel war on Iran, given the intensified repression they have been facing from the Islamic regime, Hassani says, “For the dissidents who have spent years building the infrastructure of resistance, the ongoing aggression has been nothing short of catastrophic.” She explains how the current war serves as a pretext for the regime to conduct raids and arrest activists for complicity with foreign powers without any due procedure or evidence and double down on political prisoners, who have been facing executions since this war began. Musician and author Majdy, who is currently based in Tehran, concurs with Hassani on this question. He says, “This war makes the struggle even harder for Iranians who are seeking freedom. It can only help the hardliners rise to the surface. What has happened so far is that these attacks have pushed the country toward a level of radicalisation that was previously almost unimaginable. For example, the internet was already censored and filtered, but now, for more than a month, people in Iran have been cut off from it entirely.” Majdy believes that the US-Israel war on Iran works against anyone who seeks a reasonable path towards change.

Hassani also points out how the war on Iran is being fought not just on the ground but also through American media’s narratives. “The ultraconservative push in the media to centre the son of the popularly deposed Pahlavi monarch represents the most harmful and divisive effort driving strong disagreement in the Iranian diaspora. It aims to legitimise the US-Israeli campaign by selling a false nostalgia for a supposedly “free Iran” that existed before the dark days of clerical tyranny.” According to her, very few outside the Pahlavi camp have expressed any support for foreign military intervention. Majdy states that if at all the US-Israel war may seem welcome to any Iranians living outside or within the country, it is because they imagine that it can remove the regime in a clean way that will somehow leave Iran intact for them. “But that comes from a very cartoonish, unrealistic and fantasy-like understanding of regime change and of the relationship between a regime, a state and a society,” he explains. “It is very difficult to attack a regime without harming the state and the people.” The most crucial issue Hassani raises busts the myth that the US-Israeli aggression has anything to do with ‘saving’ Iranians from the regime: “Despite their mutually performed antagonisms and the often divergent rhetoric of their officials, the US, Israeli and Iranian governments are converging toward the same ends—the stifling of Iranian activists’ efforts, the silencing of their voices and the undermining of their democratic aspirations.”

Notwithstanding these dangerous circumstances, Iranian filmmakers like Panahi have returned home after taking their award-winning film across the world—even if it means returning to serve a prison sentence. Majdy elaborates on why escaping the country is not an alternative for artists even at such a critical juncture: “I believe many of them stay in Iran and continue to endure censorship and oppression because they know that their source of inspiration lives there. They cannot be separated from that source and still remain equally inspired by it.” This deep-seated love of the Iranian people for their land and their cultural roots is perhaps what ultimately remains at stake in a war where the aggressors threaten to eradicate an entire civilisation.

This article appeared in Outlook’s April 21 issue, 'I Ran To Bomb Iran, But Instead I Ran' which looked at the US-Israel war on Iran and what it means for families living through it and what is at stake in the states going to elections in the first phase.