Russia has long sought to prevent Iran from having normal relations with the world, former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said, days after the Russian foreign minister faulted him for accepting a sanctions clause in a 2015 nuclear deal.
Speaking at a conference in Tehran, Zarif said Russia has two “red lines” in its policy toward Iran — that the country should never enjoy normal relations with the world and should also not enter direct confrontation. “That is why Russia supported the Geneva interim agreement. It kept the wound open but prevented conflict,” he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Lavrov said earlier this week that the snapback provision — which allows the rapid return of UN sanctions if Iran breaches the agreement — was “largely Zarif’s creation” and a “legal trap” for Tehran.
Zarif said the snapback clause was added during the final stage of nuclear talks as a substitute for a far worse proposal from Russia and France. “Mr Lavrov and the French had suggested a very bad plan on the status of previous UN Security Council resolutions, and we worked hard to replace it,” he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.
He said the final mechanism, later included in the 2015 nuclear deal and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, was designed to prevent any single country from using its veto to block or extend sanctions.
Hardliners in Iran have long criticized Zarif for accepting the JCPOA’s snapback mechanism, viewing it as a concession that enabled the reimposition of UN sanctions.
Last month, France, Germany and the United Kingdom triggered the snapback mechanism, restoring UN sanctions on Iran over its nuclear activities after they accused Tehran of blocking inspections and rejecting diplomacy. The move came despite opposition from Russia and China.
Long mistrust
In a leaked 2022 interview, Zarif said Russia had tried to prevent the 2015 deal from being finalized, adding that “Russia made every possible effort in the final week to stop the agreement from being concluded.”
Zarif also accused Moscow this week of disclosing sensitive information about Iran’s military and diplomatic activities, including General Qassem Soleimani’s visit to Moscow and details of Iranian drone supplies to Russia for the war in Ukraine. “They were the ones who made those public,” he said.
Lavrov has said Russia has always supported the nuclear deal and the UN Security Council resolution that endorsed it. He said the final decision on the JCPOA “was made directly by Zarif and Kerry” and that other participants, including Russia, were observers.
The United States withdrew from the deal in 2018 during first President Donald Trump’s administration. In response, Iran gradually reduced its compliance and in 2019 began enriching uranium at higher levels.
For eighty-four years, he lived between art and truth and chose the latter as his art.
When he could no longer make films because Iran's theocratic system would not let him, he endured in silence. That moral stillness, that refusal, will grant him a kind of immortality no monument could.
It might sound sentimental, but it’s no small thing to hold on to principles that offer no promise of survival: to keep saying no to censor when yes could buy you comfort.
Most people take the deal and call it success. For Taghvai, success meant honesty, even if it meant silence. He chose to stop working than betray the essence of his work and bow to censors.
For years, he chose quiet over compromise, teaching instead of directing, living modestly but faithfully to an idea of cinema that no longer seemed to belong to this world.
'Found freedom' in death
Taghvai died on October 14, 2025. The modern world—obsessed with visibility, market value, and the algorithmic myth of individuality—has little patience for those who stand apart.
Everyone believes they are unique; artists are sure of it. But there is a difference between those who merely believe it and those who live it. Most pass through history collecting, as Andy Warhol once put it, their fifteen minutes of fame.
Others—those like Nasser Taghvai—shape history from within.
His wife, the filmmaker Marzieh Vafamehr, announced his passing with a single, luminous sentence: “Nasser Taghvai, the artist who chose the difficulty of living free, has found freedom.”
That line captures him entirely: liberation through honesty, not survival through compromise.
The smell of oil and the sea
Taghvai was born in 1941 in Abadan, a city poised between refinery and sea—between modernity and tradition. The geography of the south shaped his eyes: the heat, the salt, the rhythm of labor and myth.
He studied Persian literature at the University of Tehran, but it was life, not books, that made him a filmmaker.
His early documentaries of the 1960s, such as Wind of Jinn (1969), were meditations on fear, faith, and freedom. For him, cinema was never entertainment; it was knowledge in motion. He helped forge the Iranian New Wave, replacing sentimentality with silence, rhythm, and thought.
In Tranquility in the Presence of Others (1970), he dissected authoritarian family structures so precisely it was banned. In Sadegh Kordeh (1972), he brought Iran’s forgotten peripheries to the center. In My Uncle Napoleon (1976), he revealed—through humor and tenderness—a society haunted by its own mistrust.
After the 1979 Revolution, in a suffocating climate of censorship, he made Captain Khorshid (1985), a southern reimagining of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. A parable of courage and dignity, it won the Locarno Prize and remains one of Iran’s cinematic masterpieces.
Later came Hey Iran, a satire that turned laughter into rebellion, and Paper Without Lines, a meditation on imagination and identity.
“When I cannot tell the truth, I don’t make films”
His final project, Bitter Tea, about the Iran–Iraq War, was shut down. His response was austere and unforgettable: “When I cannot tell the truth, I don’t make films.”
For Taghvai, not making a film was itself an act of art—a decision against deception.
Across his work, one theme persisted: resistance to power and deceit. In Tranquility in the Presence of Others, madness defies authority.
In Captain Khorshid, honor resists betrayal. In Hey Iran, laughter dismantles militarism.
His cinema was intellectual yet humane, philosophical yet popular. He never mocked his audience; he invited them to think.
“The camera is not just an eye; It’s a conscience”
Taghvai was not only a filmmaker but a teacher of filmmakers. For him, cinema was not a profession but a way of perceiving. Generations of Iranian directors learned from his credo “the camera is not just an eye—it’s a conscience.”
He lived between presence and absence: present in his images, absent in his long silences. He refused to lie for visibility, to flatter power for memory, or to compromise for survival. “Art that isn’t honest isn’t art,” he once said.
In a world where art is often reduced to advertisement, he proved that honesty is the hardest, most enduring form of resistance. Even in stillness, he made the loudest noise.
His death is not just a farewell to a filmmaker. It is an invitation to remember that independence in art means standing against power without shouting — to be quiet, and yet remain unforgettable.