Nasser Taghvai, one of Iran’s most distinctive and uncompromising filmmakers, died on Tuesday at 84, leaving behind some of the country’s most memorable cinema before choosing silence over censorship.
Born in 1941 in Abadan, in Iran’s southern oil fields, Taghvai emerged as a defining voice of the Iranian New Wave that reshaped the nation’s cinema in the 1960s and ’70s.
His early feature Tranquility in the Presence of Others (1970) was praised for its psychological realism and banned for its critique of authority.
The 1976 television series My Uncle Napoleon, satirizing despotic rule and a conspiratorial mindset, became a cultural touchstone still quoted in everyday conversation.
Taghvai won international acclaim with his 1987 film Captain Khorshid — an adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.
After a twelve-year hiatus, he returned with Paper Without Lines (Kaghaz bi Khat, 2001). The film won the Special Jury Prize at Iran’s Fajr Film Festival, but Taghvai did not attend the gala and later refused the award altogether.
“Please excuse me from accepting the Crystal Simorgh statuette and the voucher toward buying a car,” he wrote in his letter of withdrawal with characteristic irony.
“I am ashamed before each of the fair-minded jurors whose good intentions favored my work, but I must inform you that I have neither the money to buy a car nor the space in my small home to keep the grandest of prizes.”
‘I no longer wait’
That blend of humor and quiet defiance defined his later years, when he turned away from filmmaking altogether—a protest, he said, against a system that had hollowed out the very idea of art.
“As long as I have to ask someone’s permission to make a film, I won’t make one,” he said in a rare appearance at a guild event.
“By not making films, I’m trying, in my own small way, to help bring down this cinema, so that maybe something new can grow in its place.”
Taghvai’s silence became his final creative act — a refusal to participate in what he called the “collapse of cinema into obedience.”
For him, cinema was inseparable from dignity. His life traced a radical arc: from helping to create modern Iranian cinema to standing apart from it when he believed it had lost its soul—taken over by crude, clueless censors.
“The person who reads the screenplay has no idea what cinema even is,” he once said when asked about obtaining permission from Iran’s culture ministry.
“So I no longer waste my time—and I no longer wait.”
Mizan's report said the sale of such dolls has recently become common on social media platforms and in certain stores, adding that many sellers are unaware of their “anti-religious nature.”
The prosecutor’s office instructed judicial officers to identify those involved in the production, distribution, and marketing of the dolls as soon as possible and to hand over the suspects to the judiciary, the report added.
Mizan’s report comes a day after a petition was launched on Karzar.net, a government-monitored Iranian petition platform, calling on the judiciary to prosecute those behind the dolls and tighten oversight of online sales.
The campaign, which has gathered more than 3,300 signatures since Saturday, accuses the manufacturers of insulting Shiite sanctities.
The dolls, marketed under names such as Morteza and Marziyeh, are designed as stress-relief toys shaped like animals including gorillas, monkeys, or pigs.
The name Morteza is a title associated with Imam Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad revered by Shiite Muslims as the first Imam. Marziyeh is also a title associated with Fatimah, the Prophet’s daughter and a central figure in Shiite Islam.
According to Iranian media reports, the dolls have been sold on Iran’s biggest online marketplace Digikala and other platforms, including Instagram.
