Vague Visages’ The Sealed Soil essay contains spoilers. Marva Nabili’s 1977 movie features Flora Shabaviz. Check out more VV film essays at the home page.

The recent awarding of Jafar Panahi’s latest meta-film It Was Just an Accident with the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival is just another feather in the cap of the rich and illustrious history of Iranian cinema. Its vibrancy today despite government restrictions and the overt censoring and jailing of its own filmmakers who speak out against the nation’s cruel and oppressive bureaucratic systems stretches back in time to and before the rise of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami — two filmmakers who put Iranian cinema on the global map. Recently, however, past cinematic productions have been slowly unearthed and given new life in the theater. I was mesmerized and speechless the first time I saw Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind (1976) when it played at my local theater, in its new restoration that miraculously resulted from it being discovered in a closet wasting away. 

With Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977), another recently restored Iranian film, the day-in-the-life premise — featuring 19-year-old Roo-Bekheir (Flora Shabaviz) — will undeniably garner apt comparisons to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), but what the film does so well is that is renders its central character an integral part of a village and society. This is often the major distinction between Western and Eastern stories of women’s liberation — the former tends to assume independent living and working as a default option, while the latter must contend with blood relations and societal involvement in a woman’s life as a default. Due to this, The Sealed Soil lingers on the moments of solitude not tied to work around a house, as if savoring them, and relays these moments with as much patience and detail as the domestic sequences. Even the home scenes often take place outside in a courtyard, and almost no sequences are filmed from fully indoors. 

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Nabili maintains distance with the camera, establishing a level of anonymity with Roo-Bekheir, but she also consistently and explicitly centers the protagonist as part of the surroundings. Roo-Bekheir’s life is one of sequestered spaces, which are integral when unveiling where she feels free and where she does not. A recurring wide shot in The Sealed Soil focuses on a group of school girls walking to and from train tracks. In one of the sequences, a teacher — dressed in western pants and suit attire — gives the youths instructions. This becomes integral to Roo-Bekheir, whose family and village consistently pressure her into marrying, as a distant portal to another world — a seemingly forbidden place. She often finds solitude in the woods when picking herbs, and eventually decides to take her top off and sit during a rainstorm, to feel the slightest bit of ability to express her womanhood away from everyone and everything. 

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One other major decision, most likely an extension of censorship and sociopolitical pressures which existed even before the Islamic Revolution during Reza Pahlavi’s reign, is that there are no declarative statements within The Sealed Soil or any grand rebellions launched in explicit terms. Roo-Bekheir is silent yet defiant, and the Iranian movie is fully liberated from a constriction of defining itself sociologically or politically, as Nabili expresses her belief in female independence in absolute terms. The protagonist answers questions about her rejection of male suitors and the potential sale of her family’s land to an outside investor in direct and short answers, and any frustration that she expresses often takes place when no one else is around. 

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Nabili’s The Sealed Soil can be seen as a precursor of the minimalist styles that came to define so much of modern Iranian cinema. Like in Taste of Cherry, directed by the aforementioned Kiarostami, there’s a similar trajectory where a protagonist contemplates faith and tradition that leads her to a singular act. Nabili’s compositions of landscape, solitude, silence and long takes are essentially recreated in Kiarostami’s 1997 film to elicit the same kind of detachment from society, where one feels like what they believe and think is not compatible with their surroundings. In Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003), the climactic sequence of a pizza delivery driver wandering around a rich Persian man’s house is brought to mind in The Sealed Soil when Roo-Bekheir finds moments of solitude away from her village. The ability to just sit and take in spaces is a small but uniquely liberating experience for women in Iran, as well as for working class individuals. 

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Much of the Iranian New Wave, as framed through Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969), has had a number of waves that followed, most prominently with Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf in the 90s. However, the films in between often get lost in the shuffle. The result of recent restorations is hopefully a continued understanding that cinema about women (and films directed by women) have always existed across cultures. It’s not that the creative impulse that wasn’t there, but the access and preservation that often leaves incredible films like The Sealed Soil by the wayside. And so these restorations function as a recognition of Iranian cinema consistently breaking ground and boundaries across generations through any and all social and political tribulations.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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