Iranian movies, or movies from Iran ?

After watching this breathtaking movie “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” (directed by Ana Lily Armirpour) I am more and more convinced that there is a fundamental difference between movies maade by Iranian cinematographers living and working abroad for reasons of personal and artistic freedom, and movies made by Iranians at home. The latter are usually praised for the political braveness and personal risk that the film crew and the artists take, sometimes working clandestine as for instance Jafah Panahi with “Tehran Taxi”. Movies made in Iran also have high chances to win prices at international festivals, as they did at the Berlinale, at Cannes or at the Academy awards.
But my own preference are the films made by Iranian exiled directors abroad. I always liked “Woman without Men” by Shirin Neshat, “Persepolis” and recently “Chicken with plums” by Marjane Satrapi, and “Green Wave” and “Salami Aleikum” by Ali Samadi Ahadi, and now this phantastic “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”. It avoids any superficial political message, but it is filled with eternal and general questions of morality, tragic clash between a social decay and the private pursue of honesty and love. It lets us follow the nightly walks of a dark covered girl through the empty streets of the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness. The townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire.

This is a kind of movie one could watch again and again. It is full of pictures, scenes and impressions that are not easy to grab on the first glance. Somewhere I read a critic saying “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is an iconic feminist movie. I don’t know, either I lack the sensitivity for this, or I have no issue with feminist movie, but it would not come to my mind at all.