General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Cow (گاو)

The Cow (Persian: گاو, Gāv) is a 1969 Iranian black-and-white drama directed by Dariush Mehrjui (داریوش مهرجویی), in which a poor villager, Mash Hassan, descends into madness and comes to believe he is his own cow after the animal dies. Adapted from a short story by Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi (غلامحسین ساعدی), it is widely considered the first film of the Iranian New Wave and won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 32nd Venice International Film Festival.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Dariush Mehrjui, co-writing the screenplay with Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi, adapted from Sa'edi's story collection Azādārān-e Bayal (1965)²
Year and length	1969, 104 minutes, in Persian (Farsi), black and white¹^•³; the IFFR catalog instead lists 1968 and 100 minutes⁴
Lead performance	Ezzatollah Entezami (عزت‌الله انتظامی) as Mash Hassan, who won Best Actor at the Chicago International Film Festival⁵
Principal award	FIPRESCI (critics') Prize, 32nd Venice International Film Festival, 1971²
Censorship history	Government-funded but banned immediately after completion for its negative portrayal of rural poverty, then smuggled to Venice⁴
Historical standing	Widely considered the first film of the Iranian New Wave²

Spoilers

Plot

Mash Hassan, a farmer in a poor village, keeps the village's only cow, and his attachment to the animal goes beyond livelihood: he accompanies her to pasture, feeds her clover, and takes on a fatherly role toward her unborn calf, since he and his wife have no children.¹^•⁶ When Hassan travels to Tehran, the cow dies of an unknown cause. With his wife's consent, the villagers bury the carcass in the yard of his house and tell him on his return that the animal simply wandered off.¹

Hassan does not believe them. He insists the cow is alive, then begins to empathize with her until he believes he himself is the cow, threatened by foreigners, and takes on her lifestyle and behavior.¹ The advice of the village elders accomplishes nothing, and the village head and Mash Eslam finally decide to bind him hand and foot and take him to the city for treatment. On the way he escapes from them, falls into a valley, and dies.¹

The film leaves some causes deliberately obscure. The UCLA Film & Television Archive notes that three shadowy figures from another village, who may have killed the cow, appear periodically in the village and on a distant hillside, and that Hassan's metamorphosis, like that of Kafka's clerk, remains unknowable, as do the quasi-religious rituals performed by an old woman.⁶ BAMPFA's synopsis states outright that the animal, the sole source of life for the small village, is killed by marauders, and that Hassan's neighbors try but fail to protect him from the grief they see coming.³

Production and censorship

Mehrjui had studied film and philosophy at UCLA, where one of his teachers was Jean Renoir, and he directed a first commercial feature in Tehran in 1966 before making The Cow as his second feature.⁶^•⁷ The film was funded by the Iranian government, produced with the Ministry of Arts and Culture's Company for Cinema and Film Makers, and shot by cinematographer Fereydoun Ghovanlou with music by the composer and ethnomusicologist Hormoz Farhat.⁴^•¹

Censorship shaped the film's release twice. According to the IFFR catalog, it was banned immediately after completion because of its negative portrayal of rural Iranian poverty, and it was smuggled to the Venice Film Festival in 1971, where it won the FIPRESCI critics' prize.⁴ The Viennale catalog adds that the Shah's censors, angered by its exposé of poverty and backwardness, allowed release only after certain scenes were reshot.⁷ The film was the first Iranian film to enter several international film festivals.⁸

Its afterlife under the Islamic Republic was unusual. After the 1979 revolution, cinema faced the risk of being shut down under Sharia-based restrictions, but Ayatollah Khomeini, who had not seen a film until then, saw The Cow, was satisfied with its story, and agreed that filmmakers' activities should continue.²

Style and interpretation

The film blends Italian neorealism with surrealism, mysticism, and Persian poetic influence.⁴^•² Mehrjui's camerawork frames the villagers in tight close-ups or through windows, doors, and over walls, limiting both the viewer's vision and the characters' movement, an image of an unchanging world that falls out of its anchor when the cow dies.⁴^•⁶ The cast consisted of professional stage actors, several of whom got their first film experience on the picture, including Ali Nassirian, Jamshid Mashayekhi, Parviz Fannizadeh, and Mahin Shahabi alongside Entezami.⁶^•¹

Scholarship reads the film as social commentary. A study in the journal Adaptation argues that Mehrjui draws on Sa'edi's work to portray a microcosm of Iranian society, organized around the motifs of overdependence, fear, religion, and waiting, interpretable in the Iran of the late 1960s and 1970s.⁹ Cinema Iranica's history of pre-revolutionary alternative cinema notes that at a time when rural life and the incorruptibility of peasants were romanticized, the film's poetic pessimism about village life was a subversive act against Pahlavi claims of progress and modernization; Sa'edi, the source author, was a leftist writer and psychiatrist.¹⁰ The cow has also been read as a metaphor for economic dependency, allowing socio-political critique in a constrained political climate without direct political statements.¹¹

Reception and legacy

Entezami's performance became the film's most celebrated element: his face and body begin to approximate the features of the cow as he assumes the animal's personality, and he won an acting prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, reported in Persian sources as the Silver Hugo for Best Actor.⁴^•⁵ The film was also nominated for the Gold Hugo at Chicago, won Best Screenplay at the 1970 Sepās Film Festival, and received an OCIC Award recommendation at the 1972 Berlin International Film Festival.¹²^•²^•¹³

At home it became a touchstone. According to the news agency IRNA, in critics' polls of Iranian cinema conducted in the Iranian years 1351, 1367, and 1378 (roughly 1972, 1988, and 1999), The Cow was chosen as the best film in the history of Iranian cinema.¹⁴ Its critical and audience success at home and abroad proved decisive for the future of the New Wave, and its social relevance inspired a generation of Iranian filmmakers.¹⁵^•⁷ A restored print from the National Film Archives of Iran has circulated in retrospective screenings.⁶

Dariush Mehrjui, born 17 Azar 1318 in the Iranian calendar, was killed along with his wife at their villa on 22 Mehr 1402 (October 2023).¹⁴

A different film with the same English title exists: Cow (2021), Andrea Arnold's documentary about a dairy cow named Luma on an English farm. The two works are unrelated.¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1966 to 1969

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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