With President Donald Trump recently threatening to destroy Iranian civilization itself, the country’s filmmakers carry on their long tradition of defiant, deeply human cinema forged under censorship, imprisonment, and war.

With the people of Iran now targeted by the goons currently running the United States and Israel, Donald Trump’s recent and explicit threat to destroy their very “civilization” has only lent even more agony to it all. The word conjurs the potential loss of a truly great five-thousand-year legacy in architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry. I feel a particular pang for Iranian cinema, which was already severely impaired by the repressive dictatorship of the Islamic Republic, with many filmmakers imprisoned or forced into exile.

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But with the massive destruction of the US-Israeli war on Iran, one has to wonder — can this brilliant and unique cinema possibly continue to endure such a constant state of catastrophe?

No national cinema is more worthy of preservation than Iran’s. I used to teach a short section on the Iranian New Wave in my introductory course on film history at the University of California, Berkeley, and it was always such a pleasure to see students’ surprise and delight at these films’ combination of heartfelt realism and metacinematic sophistication.