The late Dariush Mehrjui’s harrowing tale of moral and social destitution is like Mamma Roma visiting the slums of 1970s Tehran. Here, a young man named Ali brings his elderly and ailing father to the city for treatment. Unable to secure admission to a hospital, they are forced into life on the streets, where Ali encounters a rogue hospital driver, a nurse, and the head of a blood-dealing operation. He eventually ends up working for the latter, buying blood from junkies and the poor.
Based on Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi’s Garbage Dump, Dayereh-ye Mina marks Mehrjui’s second collaboration with the renowned writer, following the pivotal The Cow. Featuring Mehrjui regulars Ali Nasirian and Ezzatollah Entezami, the film also controversially casts the popular filmfarsi star Forouzan, whose performance reveals a previously underexplored versatility. Although there was no shortage of bleak wretchedness in Mehrjui’s films of that period, this one – due to the absence of metaphysical or symbolic elements that marked his work – is perhaps the work with the greatest capacity to shock. It came with a heavy price: The Iranian Medical Association lodged strong objections and the film was banned for two years before it was eventually screened once at the Shiraz Arts Festival in 1976, followed by a limited but successful theatrical run in 1978. As in The Cow and The Postman, in which ordinary men turn into animals, there is another metamorphosis embedded in Dayereh-ye Mina, though a far subtler one: the perfectly angelic Ali is compelled by his surroundings to become a monster. It does not, however, fundamentally change his outlook or behaviour. Rather, what makes Dayereh- ye Mina the most unsettling of Mehrjui’s films is that the unleashing of a beastly nature makes Ali slick and calculating. The film therefore introduces us to a society suffering from economic, social, and cultural sepsis – a society that, in attempting to cure itself, ultimately slit its own wrists with the 1979 Revolution.

Ehsan Khoshbakht