Tales and the Cinematic Divan of Rakhshan Banietemad

This chapter considers the film in the context of Banietemad’s other works, analyzing the ways in which its style creates a delicate balance between social realism and poetic cinema. This chapter discusses how the theme of love and its structural treatment within the film evokes classical Persian traditions of love poetry known as ghazal, constituting evidence of the emergence of what she has previously termed the “cinematic ghazal.”