Well, unseen in the U.S. Maybe you've seen it in the U.K.?
The Unseen Work of One of Iran’s Greatest Filmmakers
For the director Mani Haghighi, his country’s rich cinematic tradition is a family affair.
By Richard Brody
Since 2012, only one country has won the Oscar for Best International Feature twice: Iran. The achievement is all the more remarkable for the stringent censorship that filmmakers in the Islamic Republic face and also because, in this category, the Academy (unlike, say, the Golden Globes or the National Society of Film Critics) considers only official submissions from national film boards, one per country. This means that filmmakers out of favor with autocratic regimes—including, in Iran, some of the nation’s greatest artists—don’t stand a chance, and some of the most notable recent Iranian films have been submitted by other countries. One of this year’s nominees, “It Was Just an Accident,” by the dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi, was the entrant for France, where several of its co-producers are based; Panahi, who has been imprisoned for his activism and was banned from filmmaking in 2010, has since shot his films clandestinely. In 2024, another director, Mohammad Rasoulof, fled to Germany after being sentenced to a flogging and eight years in prison; the final film he made before leaving, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” received an Oscar nomination last year, having been submitted by Germany.
Yet, like the Academy, the movie business at large has its blind spots; some of Iran’s best films remain unrecognized in the United States. At New York’s Iranian Film Festival, which was held three times between 2019 and 2025, I saw two films by the director Mani Haghighi—“Pig” (2018) and “Subtraction” (2022)—and reviewed both enthusiastically. Few critics have had the chance to agree: “Pig” had only a nominal U.S. release, and “Subtraction” is still unreleased here. Yet both movies are worthy of mention alongside anything released during that time, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call Haghighi’s 2016 feature “A Dragon Arrives!” one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century. It played in a handful of American film festivals in 2016 and 2017 but has never been in theatrical release or available on streaming here. For those in the U.S., appreciating Haghighi’s œuvre currently involves trawling the web for bootlegs, but the more of his work I’ve watched, the more convinced I am that he is one of the world’s most interesting and most woefully underrated filmmakers.
Iranian movies have been among the treasures of world cinema long before the Oscars deigned to take notice, of course, and also before the Islamic Revolution installed the current regime, in 1979.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/mani-haghighi-movie-review