Few filmmakers have loved their country as deeply or tenderly as Bahram Beyzaie loves Iran. A founding father of the Iranian New Wave, Beyzaie emerged, along with Dariush Mehrjui and Masoud Kimiai, as one of the most important cultural directors of his generation. His films – a selection and mixture of Persian legends, symbols and fiction – are popular stories of outcasts on a terrible journey to social acceptance. Beyzaie, himself a member of the persecuted Bahá’í religion, was able to draw on his knowledge of marginal politics to become the rare, necessary, anti-minority hero. Nowhere is this more clear than in his own 1986 movie, Bashu, Little Stranger.
They are fighting represents as a prudent solution supported by the Iranian government .““Sacred Defense Cinema”, a genre of war films offered during the Iran-Iraq war that tried to recreate martyrdom (especially the killing of children) as a divine act of national devotion. Beyzaie instead turns his camera to the tragedy of migration, revealing an Iran far more divided than wartime propaganda. They are fighting from public examination for about three years. .“At that time,” Beyzaie explained by 2025 interview, .“any word that did not glorify war was met with threats and was strictly forbidden.”
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When the film was finally released in 1989hailed as a masterpiece of humanism, with 2018 a poll of Iranian critics declaring that the greatest Iranian film ever made. Now, 40 years ago, at the beginning of a new conflict, They are fighting it has re-emerged – thanks to a timely restoration that premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival – as an urgent and enduring work that examines not only the perils of war but also the complexities of Iranian nationalism.
The film follows the eponymous Bashu (played by Adnan Afravian), a traumatized Arab-Iranian boy, as he flees his home in Khuzestan after being orphaned by the bombings in Iraq. He arrives in Mazandaran, near the Caspian Sea, where he meets Na’i (Susan Taslimi) and her children who reluctantly take him in. Here, Bashu struggles to assimilate, unable to understand Na’i Gilaki’s language, while he, remains confused about his nationality. Faced with a foreign world and a completely different culture, which is really trying to erase his existence, Bashu can’t help but ask: .“Am I in Iran?”
As Beyzaie’s film progresses, a quiet, overt dismantling of Persian ethnocentrism begins to emerge – by highlighting two marginalized communities, neither of which speak Farsi as their first language, They are fighting offers another view of Iran, not as a country but rather a polycultural civilization in denial. .“Iranians have become isolated from each other,” Beyzaie commented when it comes to this film, the division that can be seen through the eyes of Bhashu who comes to his hometown as if he crossed the border.
Today, the war is raging again millions of Iraniansthese endless stages have moved to the world stage. For example, in foreign countries, monarchists clash with pro-regime voices, each claiming to speak for unity. .“The Iranian people” – the very illusion that Beyzaie wanted to dispel. .‘Iranian-ness’ is becoming more and more questionable, as if one’s identity is entirely dependent on perception. In .‘The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran’, Professor Ali M. Ansari, drawing on the work of Mohammad Ali Foroughi, opposes this kind of cultural recognition and suggests that Iranians are, in fact, united not by language, ethnicity, or political allegiance, but by shared histories, myths and a land that has survived thousands of years of attacks and internal conflicts. It is this idea that lives at the heart of They are fighting again.
In one of the film’s most impressive sequences, Bashu, who is haunted by a spectral zar (a dangerous spirit associated with spiritism in southern Iran) of warplanes, jumps into a burning flame and repeats in a school book, in official Persian: .“Iran is our country. We come from the same country. We are the children of Iran.”
In this moment, as Afravian’s tragic performance is closely observed, you see Bashu turning on himself the official language of his discrimination. In 1935Reza Shah’s regime institutionalized .‘standard Persian’ (Farsi) as the sole language of the country, suppresses all others, including Bashu’s Arabic. It was a policy of homogenisation that forced the Islamic Republic under the guise of national unity. By repeating the words of the state on camera, for them, Bashu is not giving himself to the state; he equips it, using the language of analogy to assert his basic right to exist. Beyzaie questions the hypocrisy and futility of the nation’s attempt to unify culture. Instead, he points out that Iranian identity is rooted in nature, in sound myth: Bashu’s encounter with zār, his leap over fire – a tradition that is old enough before Islam, let alone the modern state of the nation. These actions represent a much more powerful and expansive connection to the world than anything found in a textbook or a tweet.
