Iran International
Authorities in Iran are increasingly targeting businesses rather than individuals who refuse to observe the theocracy’s strict social laws around veiling and gender mixing, several café owners and citizens told Iran International.
Police reportedly shut down the popular clothing brand Gin West’s store on Farshchian Street in Tehran on October 10, one day after a mixed-gender private celebration.
The brand’s Instagram page was also blocked. The semi-official website Asianews Iran described the move as part of a broader campaign seeking “greater control over social spaces, combating displays of wealth, and stricter enforcement of moral laws.”
Business owners say Tehran’s message is clear: any public display of happiness, especially involving men and women together, will be treated as defiance.
‘Example for others’
The campaign follows a series of viral videos showing social events in urban centers, including a “coffee party” on Kish Island that drew sharp reactions from officials.
A female café owner in Tehran who has endured multiple police raids told Iran International that officials routinely demand exorbitant bail sums from detainees — often “billions of rials” regardless of their financial status.
“They want to make examples of us. They use our businesses as warning signs for others,” she said, adding that security forces appear particularly focused on gatherings involving young people.
Analysts say the regime’s anxiety stems from the fear that a single dance party could inspire a chain of similar acts of defiance.
‘Fear us constant’
Videos have surfaced on Iranian social media in recent weeks showing café owners in cities such as Dezful and Qom expressing remorse for hosting events with music or mixed dancing and urging customers to obey hijab laws to avoid punishment.
“These are not just moral warnings,” said a café employee in Tehran. “They are psychological operations. They want us to police ourselves and silence each other, especially women.”
He added that many business owners now censor themselves preemptively, refusing to host birthday parties or small music gatherings out of fear of closure. “They use sealing as a tool of intimidation,” he said. “The fear is constant.”
‘Genie is out of the bottle’
Beyond enforcing social codes, evidence suggests the state is using business closures as a weapon of political retaliation.
Information obtained by Iran International indicates that in at least two cases, authorities sealed businesses in Tehran because the owners or their relatives were involved in political or protest activities.
A café worker in Mashhad said the government believes harsh enforcement will discourage others from hosting social gatherings.
“They think sealing and arrests will stop people,” he said. “But every day there are more of these events. The genie is out of the bottle and it won’t go back in.”
In the absence of public spaces for leisure or free expression, modern cafés have become rare sanctuaries: informal hubs for art, conversation, and community among Iran’s youth.
By closing these spaces and criminalizing joy, the government risks deepening public resentment. The government may hope intimidation will restore its version of order, but its tactics appear only to fuel defiance.
As one café owner in north Tehran put it, “Every time they close a door, another one opens. You can’t ban happiness forever.”
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.