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Thousands of federal prosecutors have been fired or have resigned from their roles since Pam Bondi took over as Attorney General. She has made no secret of weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue Donald Trump’s vendettas. One of those prosecutors is Troy Edwards, who quit a senior national-security position in the Eastern District of Virginia. As an assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., Edwards had won convictions against members of the Oath Keepers for January 6th-related offenses. Edwards is also the son-in-law of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, and, when the Justice Department indicted Comey on grounds widely seen as flimsy, Edwards knew he had reached his red line. (The charges were quickly dismissed, though without prejudice.) The New Yorker’s legal correspondent Ruth Marcus talks with Edwards about his decision to leave, how he broke it to his family, and why he thinks other prosecutors should not follow his lead.

Further reading:

• “Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress,” by Ruth Marcus
• “The Flimsy, Dangerous Indictment of James Comey,” by Ruth Marcus
• “Pam Bondi’s Power Play,” by Ruth Marcus

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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The new play “Giant,” on Broadway, dramatizes the scandal around Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s-book author who, in the nineteen-eighties, began making antisemitic statements and invoking stereotypes about Jewish influence. John Lithgow portrays Dahl as he faces off against his American publisher, who presses him to retract his comments. The events that the show focusses on took place more than forty years ago, but they couldn’t be more relevant today, as antisemitism surges during a war in the Middle East. Lithgow joins David Remnick to discuss the question of whether to separate the art from the artist—and about his own hesitation regarding his role as the wizard Dumbledore in HBO’s new “Harry Potter” series, because of J. K. Rowling’s history of anti-trans statements.

Further reading:

• “ ‘Giant’ Takes on Roald Dahl and His Antisemitism,” by John Lahr

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

On March 21st in Seoul, South Korea, the K-pop group BTS marched from Gyeongbokgung Palace to take the stage in Gwanghwamun Square, for a concert that was to be streamed across the globe on Netflix. It had been three years, five months, and six days since their last live performance. Before going on hiatus in 2022 so that the group’s seven members could complete their mandatory military service, BTS was unequivocally the biggest band in the world. They set ticket-sales and streaming records in South Korea and worldwide; in 2020, “Map of the Soul : 7” was their fourth album to début at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, nearly outpacing the Beatles. After almost four years away—during which members also found time to release a combined ten albums and thirty-eight singles as solo artists—some hundred and four thousand people in Seoul, in addition to a reported 18.4 million tuning in to the live stream, would now witness the birth of BTS 2.0.

Or was it sixty thousand people in Gwanghwamun Square? Reports varied. The municipal government had prepared for crowds of more than two hundred fifty thousand. The hundred and four thousand figure came from HYBE, BTS’s management company. Some preliminary data from the city had suggested that the number was closer to forty thousand, though eventually it went up to around sixty. Owners of restaurants near the square took heavy losses, throwing out thousands of dollars of food that they had prepared in anticipation of feeding a quarter of a million hungry fans. Depending on which figures you paid attention to, BTS’s reunion concert was either a world-dominating success or a tepid anticlimax.

To be a K-pop fan is to watch the numbers. For devout followers of BTS, or their colleagues in groups like Blackpink and Stray Kids, sales figures and stream counts are not neutral matters of fact. They are a testament to both the artist’s commanding power and to the fandom’s commitment, to how far fans will go to insure that their favored act comes out on top. Ahead of the release, last week, of “Arirang,” BTS’s comeback album, members of the group’s appropriately named fan base ARMY set some ambitious targets: between two hundred and two hundred and fifty million Spotify streams across all songs; seventy million YouTube views on the music video for “Swim,” the lead single; and the No. 1 positions globally on iTunes and Apple Music. All of this was just for the album’s first day out. “ARIRANG must be streamed ×20 TOP TO BOTTOM to achieve MAXIMUM RESULTS!!!!,” exhorted a graphic that circulated in online fan spaces. When it appeared that not all of these lofty goals were met, fans of other artists, particularly of Taylor Swift, took to X to gloat: “Taylor Ended them,” one crowed; “The life of a showgirl still outsold by millions,” said another, referring to the album that Swift released last year. Both factions were speaking the new international language of fandom, in which streams and sales are the ultimate proof of an artist’s worth—which is to say, in the U.S. and worldwide, supporters of acts across genres and national origins were speaking the language of K-pop fandom.

Ten years ago, outside of Korea and Japan, fans of acts like BigBang and Loona were often seen as members of a fringe subculture. Not so today, when you can turn on the radio almost anywhere in the world and hear the K-pop artist Rosé, of Blackpink, harmonizing with Bruno Mars on “Apt.,” a welcome burst of sugary fun amid all the maudlin weepers on last year’s pop charts, or Jack Harlow starting off a verse with the line “I’m on my Jung Kook,” shouting out BTS’s youngest member. There are now non-Korean groups that are explicitly modelled after K-pop acts, such as the “global girl group” Katseye, a co-production between HYBE and the American record label Geffen. BTS reflect on this shift on their new album. “Everybody know now where the K is,” raps the group’s leader, RM, on “Aliens”—a song that celebrates their anointment as international pop stars while insisting on their particularity as Korean artists. They name-check the independence movement leader Kim Gu and remind you, in one of the album’s occasional flashes of the group’s old cheeky bravado, that this is their house, and you need to leave your shoes at the door.

Throughout “Arirang,” BTS searches for their footing in a global pop landscape that they themselves, the conquering aliens, have terraformed. “Arirang” is a centuries-old Korean folk song that has, as Joshua Minsoo Kim writes, “long functioned as a polysemic anthem—of deep longing, collective resilience, even the reunification of North and South Korea.” In BTS’s hands, it acquires a more banal meaning. A sample of “Arirang” hums in the background of the album opener, “Body to Body,” a pulsating club track about the desire for skin contact on the dance floor: a vision of unity, sure, but one you can find on almost any pop record. In “BTS: The Return,” a documentary (also a Netflix original) on the group’s comeback, the members are palpably unenthusiastic about “Arirang” as a guiding theme for the album. They squirm in their boardroom seats as a rough mix of the “Body to Body” interlude plays. “It feels like I’m eating kimchi fried rice at Paris Baguette,” RM says, in a sly reference to another global Korean brand. Will the fans think the group has gone “all in on the patriotism,” wonders V, BTS’s baritone crooner? Or will they see the “Arirang” concept as a somewhat limp conceit that cannot obscure the music’s greige placelessness—which is to say, its Americanness?

“Arirang” was mostly recorded in L.A., in collaboration with star producers from the States such as Diplo, Ryan Tedder, and Mike WiLL Made-It. These outsized musical personalities often leave more distinctive fingerprints on the songs than the BTS members themselves do. “Normal,” with its patterned chord changes and pinched chorus melody, is a classic bit of Tedder pop rock—or rather, Tedder channelling the latest sounds in pop rock; there is more than a hint of Mk.gee’s downtuned guitar tones in those rumbling low chords. On “FYA,” RM and J-Hope rap over groaning metallic noises and a blown-out bass drum: the world’s most expensive-sounding JPEGMAFIA-type beat. (Indeed, JPEGMAFIA, the rapper and producer, had a hand in the song.)

BTS’s most engaging work often scans like bricolage: a song might have a rap-rock verse, a power-ballad chorus with a pounding four-on-the-floor E.D.M. beat, and a bridge with neo-soul chord flourishes. It is the ultimate post-genre music, assembled from disparate parts and then welded together, through the heat of sheer idol charisma, into a shiny pop assemblage. On “Arirang,” BTS trudges dutifully between sounds—including slick twenty-tens R. & B., antic posse raps, and moody indie-pop guitarscapes—less in a spirit of experimentation than in an effort to cover all the bases. At one point in the documentary, Suga, one of the group’s rappers, complains that there is too much English on the album. A company exec steps in to explain: all the English, a language only one BTS member speaks fluently, is necessary for the album to succeed in the “global market.” The record itself feels a bit like these boardroom scenes: the music is happening, the strategy is playing out, and the stars are more or less just sitting back and letting it all unfold.

K-pop is less a genre than a mode of musical production. At its core is the idol system, a vast infrastructure through which entertainment companies scout promising young performers at home and abroad; subject them to a rigorous, often years-long training regimen; and assemble them into groups, which tend to adhere to unifying “concepts”—a visual aesthetic, a musical or dance style, a market segment. Artist development, music production, choreography, promotion, and even fan engagement are all typically handled in-house. This system first took shape in Japan in the seventies; in South Korea, the companies would consolidate further, patterning themselves after chaebol, or vertically integrated family firms. In the mid-nineties, as South Korea’s explosive economic growth began to stagnate, President Kim Young-sam’s Administration made a big bet on the culture industries, passing legislation to help enliven the country’s artistic production. As the public learned to think of pop culture as a key national asset, and as a new generation of teen-agers encountered the liberatory energies of fully mobilized mass entertainment, the conditions were ripe for what we now know as K-pop—the term seems to have first been used in 1999—to flourish.

The figure of the idol is distinct from other pop archetypes like the rock star and the diva. Bang Si-hyuk, the chairman of HYBE, explained in a 2019 interview, “I believe in the West there is this deeply embedded fantasy of the rock star—a rock star acts true to their soul and everyone must accept it as part of their individuality, and only through that does good music come.” If the rock star is a romantic individual who expresses some inner truth through original music, the idol is an omnicompetent interpreter of material. (BTS threads the needle deftly between these identities: “You can call me artist / You can call me idol,” RM crows on their 2018 song “Idol,” before adding, “I don’t care.”) Rock stars and their equivalents in other genres often develop their craft in obscurity before being discovered; idols are apprentices, trained exhaustively by their management companies. And perhaps most important, although rock stars may gladly accept tribute from their fans, idols actively make themselves available to them, whether in appearance or in reality. The idol is supposed to be simultaneously unknowable and infinitely accessible, called upon to execute herculean feats of emotional labor: not just performing and recording but also meeting fans, live-streaming their daily activities, and constantly professing their appreciation for their supporters.

BTS were famously innovators in this business of intimacy at scale. At the time of their 2013 début, their frank blog posts and member-authored tweets offered fans a sense of live connection that was nowhere to be found in other acts’ impersonal P.R. communications. Since then, there has been a proliferation of K-pop intimacy machines, including social-media platforms like Weverse, where users can receive exclusive messages from idols and more ambitious projects like the idol group NCT 127’s “digital metaverse,” where fans can interact with performers’ virtual avatars. “BTS: The Return” fittingly opens with the group live-streaming a beach hangout session. Framed against a California sunset, the members chat and joke as they watch the comments roll in and the view count go up. Here, one can’t help thinking, is all the effortless charm and offhanded zaniness that “Arirang” is lacking. Even if the new music is largely inert, BTS are still able to make these scenes come alive with a special improvisational energy. They are geniuses of the vicarious.

Such has been the dominant model for producing and marketing K-pop over the past decade. American artists have used this playbook, too: despite the apparent animosity between ARMYs and Swifties online, there is something decidedly K-pop about Taylor Swift’s secret messages for fans to decode, her succession of musical and stylistic “eras.” Still, the BTS comeback provides an occasion to wonder if the machinery is starting to creak. HYBE’s stock fell by over fifteen per cent following the underattended Gwanghwamun Square concert. Bang was called in for police questioning multiple times last year, following allegations that he had deceived HYBE’s shareholders and pocketed more than a hundred million dollars of profits during the company’s I.P.O. (HYBE denies any wrongdoing.) NewJeans, one of the most exciting and innovative recent K-pop groups, has been largely inactive since 2024 due to a baroque legal dispute with the HYBE subsidiary ADOR. The idol system, concentrated around what’s known as the big four companies—HYBE, SM, JYP, and YG—is coming off as sluggish and conservative. If the big firms aren’t able to capitalize on their fresh talent, let alone secure world-beating numbers from their top acts, one might speculate: What purpose are they serving, beyond accumulating lucrative back catalogues?

Still, BTS dominates charts worldwide, even if “Arirang” failed to meet the fans’ exacting initial benchmarks. Their tour, which gets under way this spring, is sure to be one of the year’s most lucrative. Blackpink recently launched its own high-profile comeback, while other girl groups like aespa have stayed immensely popular. But increasingly the market for these acts may be more international than domestic. Of the Top Ten songs on South Korea’s digital chart at midyear last year, only three were by idol groups. Many of the others were by solo artists, and some even by artists with a history of self-producing. Tellingly, some of the very expensive music on “Arirang” sounds a lot like these surely less capital-intensive songs. Tracks like the melancholic alt-pop single “Swim” and the more guitar-heavy “Like Animals” resonate with songs like “Drowning,” an infectious piece of emo pop by Woodz, a singer who débuted as a member of a Chinese-Korean idol group and has since turned to writing and producing solo rock records. It remains to be seen if other idol-system alums will follow a similar path, or if more of the promising talent of the next generation will turn away from the trainee model altogether.

The entertainment companies seem to be wondering, too, whether they can produce idols without all the trouble of developing human talent. The first K-pop boy band to reach the No. 1 spot on Spotify’s U.S. chart, after all, was not BTS but the Saja Boys, the fictional group from the Netflix film “KPop Demon Hunters.” “I don’t know how long human artists can be the only ones to satisfy human needs and human tastes,” Bang told Billboard in 2023; the following year, HYBE backed SYI\IDI8, a cartoon girl group with A.I.-generated vocals. Another company, Galaxy Corporation, is at work on a line of humanoid “robot idols” who can perform choreography for live audiences. One wonders if an industry in the grips of such an A.I. fever has the will or even the capability to produce another BTS. Ultimately, the band’s legacy may be this: the first K-pop group to achieve world domination—and one of the last to be, from the perspective of the industry, irreplaceable. ♦

Three years ago, the quasi-scripted comedy “Jury Duty,” an unassuming offering on the now defunct streaming service Freevee, became a social-media sensation through its particular brand of gentle brazenness. Its creators, Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, Frankensteined the series by stitching together two moribund TV genres—the mockumentary sitcom and the prank show—to construct something new, if still lumbering. Cameras followed a handful of actors serving as the jurors in a fake trial alongside one unwitting civilian, a thirty-year-old solar contractor named Ronald Gladden, who believed that he was taking part in a straightforward documentary about the workings of the justice system. Surrounded by weirdos, losers, and a preening movie star (James Marsden, playing a fame-monster version of himself), Ronald spent three eventful weeks on his very own “Truman Show.” At one point, he came perilously close to the truth, declaring, “This literally feels like reality TV.”

Since the days of “Candid Camera,” a practical-joke program that began on the radio in 1947 and jumped to television the following year, prank shows have been critiqued for their exploitative dynamics. “Jury Duty” strives to reassure the audience by portraying its production as a fair trade: though the show deceives its main character, it also presents him in a favorable light, takes pains to minimize his distress, and insures that jokes are never at his expense. (Gladden also received a hundred thousand dollars and an over-all deal at Amazon for his trouble.) The series’ carefully curated feel-good vibes seemed to exceed even the novel premise as the primary source of its appeal: one review praised its “life-affirming joy.” But that very quality renders the follow-up, the awkwardly titled “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat,” unnecessary. Like so many sitcoms before it, it withers under the force of its own unrelenting sunniness.

The sophomore season, now streaming on Prime Video, features a whole new cast, who play the tight-knit employees of a Los Angeles-based hot-sauce company called Rockin’ Grandma’s. Ronald’s successor at the center of the story is Anthony Norman, another young man with an open face and an inviting disposition. Early on, Anthony is told by the company’s H.R. chief, Kevin (Ryan Perez), that he’s been hired as a temp to help out at the annual staff retreat—the last such event for the firm’s founder, Doug (Jerry Hauck), who plans to retire. Poised to take over is his thirtysomething son, Dougie (Alex Bonifer), a failed ska-E.D.M. musician with a mop of bleached hair to match, who intends to implement some changes to the family business.

Season 2’s grander ambitions are evident from the start. While the original “Jury Duty” largely took place in a courtroom and in a hotel where the jurors were sequestered, leaving the cast drably entrapped, “Company Retreat” feels less cloistered. The employees of Rockin’ Grandma’s roam the grounds of the retreat site, which boasts multiple structures, and are visited by a series of guest speakers whose lectures range from the merely dull to the truly Dada. After Dougie bombs a presentation and gets dressed down by his father, he flees into the nearby hills to lick his wounds. The actors’ hours-long commitment to the bit continues through meticulously choreographed stunts and persists even when they leave Anthony’s sight line.

These hyper-dedicated cast members are “Company Retreat” ’s greatest asset. Rockin’ Grandma’s is compared, without irony, to a family, and its “employees” feel more distinctive than the stock types who populated the first season. The most memorable include a warehouse manager named Jimmy (Jim Woods), who’s intent on reforming his boorish ways but still can’t help blurting out faux pas, as when he calls Martin Luther King, Jr., “the Tom Brady of civil rights.” A receptionist and aspiring snack-fluencer, PJ (Marc-Sully Saint-Fleur), who offers Anthony some octopus-wasabi chips on his first day, could be the most popular guy in any workplace. Even Dougie, an inveterate screwup, isn’t without hidden depths—and Anthony, a natural hype man for whoever’s around, takes his plea for emotional support seriously, quickly becoming invested in a twisty succession crisis.

Eisenberg and Stupnitsky cut their teeth in the writers’ room of “The Office,” and “Company Retreat” occasionally evokes the misadventures of a young Jim Halpert, who tries to politely stifle his laughter while the people around him engage in delusional or over-the-top behavior. Anthony’s tolerance for nonsense is clear on Day One, when he high-fives Kevin for planning to propose to a co-worker in front of the entire staff. It soon emerges that the pair hadn’t even been on a single date, and the public proposal goes accordingly. But the incident doesn’t seem to affect Anthony’s regard for the head of H.R., or his esteem for the company as a whole. Too often, the season asks the audience to see this as evidence of Anthony’s unstinting optimism, rather than the quality they must have cast him for: an apparent inability to recognize red flags.

“Jury Duty” ’s blend of comedy and reality has garnered comparisons to “The Rehearsal,” in which Nathan Fielder mounts elaborate run-throughs of difficult situations. Both series, building on the work of Sacha Baron Cohen, could be thought of as a new breed: the prestige prank show, which utilizes practical jokes to get at higher truths. Baron Cohen is best known for the “Borat” movies, in which he plays a disarming lout whose antics expose the prejudices and injustices that his targets are willing to accept or partake in. Where he stitches together one-off encounters, Fielder, Eisenberg, and Stupnitsky devise sustained, full-immersion experiments with the potential to change the lives of their subjects. In the first season of “The Rehearsal,” participants use their practice sessions to allay anxieties or to optimize strategies. In the second, Fielder takes this to a systems-level extreme, suggesting that playacting among pilots could break down the hierarchical cockpit dynamics that he believes correlate with plane crashes.

Though Fielder’s methods and hypotheses are frequently absurd, he captures something real about human nature. The regular people featured in “The Rehearsal” don’t always come off looking good: many are stiff, strange, or downright dickish. “Jury Duty,” whose scripts refer to the unsuspecting main character as the “Hero,” is hamstrung by its insistence on protecting its protagonist. When the show received a Peabody Award, in 2024, it was commended for illustrating that reality television can “bring out the best in all of us.” But this, too, is a consequence of casting—and of producers and editors working overtime to hide the seams that someone like Fielder might prefer to flaunt. Anthony’s decency is a foregone conclusion; in fact, he never exhibits anything less. To stack the deck further, and to spur their champion into action, the writers throw in a sinister trio of private-equity investors who might as well arrive twirling their mustaches. If Dougie can’t hack it as Rockin’ Grandma’s next C.E.O., the vultures are more than ready to swoop in.

It isn’t hard to buy that Anthony’s a good guy, and he’s so charismatic that you can forget, for long stretches of the season, how little else there is to define him. But even as the rest of the ensemble’s subplots become increasingly complex—and their high jinks increasingly overwrought—he remains a blank slate. Eventually, it becomes impossible not to wonder how he came to Rockin’ Grandma’s in the first place, and where he hopes to go from here. He’s a young dad, a transplant from Tennessee who’s been working odd jobs for years. Are the lengths to which he’ll go to ignore the weirdness of his new gig and make a positive impression all about being “good,” or is this a desperate audition for full-time employment that will never come? The show, with its interest in corporate buffoonery, doesn’t quite manage to hand-wave away the queasy implications. The harder it pushes for a black-and-white vision of morality, the more shades of gray appear. ♦

Since 2012, only one country has won the Oscar for Best International Feature twice: Iran. The achievement is all the more remarkable for the stringent censorship that filmmakers in the Islamic Republic face and also because, in this category, the Academy (unlike, say, the Golden Globes or the National Society of Film Critics) considers only official submissions from national film boards, one per country. This means that filmmakers out of favor with autocratic regimes—including, in Iran, some of the nation’s greatest artists—don’t stand a chance, and some of the most notable recent Iranian films have been submitted by other countries. One of this year’s nominees, “It Was Just an Accident,” by the dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi, was the entrant for France, where several of its co-producers are based; Panahi, who has been imprisoned for his activism and was banned from filmmaking in 2010, has since shot his films clandestinely. In 2024, another director, Mohammad Rasoulof, fled to Germany after being sentenced to a flogging and eight years in prison; the final film he made before leaving, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” received an Oscar nomination last year, having been submitted by Germany.

Yet, like the Academy, the movie business at large has its blind spots; some of Iran’s best films remain unrecognized in the United States. At New York’s Iranian Film Festival, which was held three times between 2019 and 2025, I saw two films by the director Mani Haghighi—“Pig” (2018) and “Subtraction” (2022)—and reviewed both enthusiastically. Few critics have had the chance to agree: “Pig” had only a nominal U.S. release, and “Subtraction” is still unreleased here. Yet both movies are worthy of mention alongside anything released during that time, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call Haghighi’s 2016 feature “A Dragon Arrives!” one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century. It played in a handful of American film festivals in 2016 and 2017 but has never been in theatrical release or available on streaming here. For those in the U.S., appreciating Haghighi’s œuvre currently involves trawling the web for bootlegs, but the more of his work I’ve watched, the more convinced I am that he is one of the world’s most interesting and most woefully underrated filmmakers.

Iranian movies have been among the treasures of world cinema long before the Oscars deigned to take notice, of course, and also before the Islamic Revolution installed the current regime, in 1979. Haghighi’s films, like those of his distinguished peers, emerge from a grand tradition that goes back more than sixty years, to the days of the Shah, who, in 1953, consolidated his despotic rule over the country in a coup backed by the U.S. and Britain. The Shah’s Western orientation extended to culture, and a wide range of artistically important international films could be seen in Tehran, in time including those of the French New Wave. During the political and artistic ferment of the nineteen-sixties, Iran was one of many countries that developed a homegrown New Wave. Iranian cinema came to international attention with a short documentary about a leper colony, “The House Is Black” (1962), directed by one of Iran’s most revered modern poets, Forugh Farrokhzad, which won a prize at West Germany’s Oberhausen festival; Ebrahim Golestan’s 1965 feature, “Brick and Mirror,” which was acclaimed in Cahiers du Cinéma, the crucible and house organ of the French New Wave; and Dariush Mehrjui’s “The Cow,” from 1969, which won a major award at the Venice Film Festival and is often cited as the first film of the Iranian New Wave.

In 1969, a local event proved even more cinematically consequential than international recognition: an organization called Kanoon, dedicated to children’s culture, appointed a young graphic artist named Abbas Kiarostami to launch a film division. He made playfully inventive educational shorts, soon expanding his scope to features exploring the lives of both children and adults, often with an ambiguous blend of documentary and fiction. Such films as “Close-Up” (1990) and “And Life Goes On” (1992)—the first Iranian film to be shown at the New York Film Festival—established his worldwide reputation as one of the cinematic masters of symbolism, metaphor, allegory, and irony. In 1997, his film “Taste of Cherry” was a co-winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Kiarostami’s work, and the prominence it brought to Iranian cinema, energized younger directors and gave them a platform. Panahi, who began his career as Kiarostami’s assistant, made his first feature in 1995, and the first years of the twenty-first century saw the débuts of Rasoulof and of Asghar Farhadi, whose later films “A Separation” (2011) and “The Salesman” (2016) brought Iran its two Best International Feature Oscars.

Haghighi, born in 1969, is a contemporary of Rasoulof and Farhadi and, like Panahi, worked with Kiarostami early in his career. But the great heritage of Iranian cinema is, for Haghighi, more than an influence: it’s a family affair. Haghighi’s father, Nemat, was a cinematographer, and his mother, the gallerist and translator Lili Golestan, is the daughter of the New Wave trailblazer Ebrahim Golestan. Haghighi went to university in Canada, studying philosophy, before returning to Tehran to begin his film career, making documentaries and commercials; his first two features, “Abadan” (2003) and “Men at Work” (2006), were shot cheaply, in small-format digital video. The latter, a wry comedy of futile endeavor, was based on a story by Kiarostami, but Haghighi soon sought to shake off Kiarostami’s influence—and, even more, a prevailing caricature of Iranian cinema that Kiarostami’s style had given rise to. Kiarostami had made films mostly with nonprofessional actors, often about rural people of modest means. As early as 2003, Haghighi said, “There has been a pressure to emulate that Kiarostami touch, which, of course, is impossible.” When “Pig” was released, he was quoted as saying, “I still love many of these films, but I feel a little crushed by the weight of their heritage on the Iranian cinema.”

After his first feature, Haghighi suggested to Farhadi that they team up and break with this tradition, working with professional actors in stories about their own milieu—the urban middle class. Their first collaboration, “Fireworks Wednesday” (2006), which they co-wrote and which Farhadi directed, was a success. Another, “About Elly” (2009), won international acclaim; again, Farhadi directed, and this time Haghighi co-starred, also pitching in on the script, uncredited. (Rachel Aviv has detailed, in this magazine, the pair’s stressful partnership.)

Steeped in international cinema, Haghighi has since taken familiar tropes, forms, and genres and bent them in new directions. His two most recent films, “Pig” and “Subtraction”—the first of his that I saw—are so different that I doubt whether a viewer who didn’t know would guess they were by the same director. “Subtraction” is a descendant of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, a taut thriller about a Tehran couple who find that another couple in the city are their doppelgängers and who, in attempting to unravel the mystery, get entangled in the other family’s life. “Pig” is a playfully anarchic yet gory comedy about a Tehran-based filmmaker named Hasan who has been banned from making films. While he’s earning a living directing commercials, directors who are still making features are being targeted in murderous attacks in which their foreheads are carved with the Persian word for “pig.” Hasan frets that his reputation is insufficient to make him a target; instead, he becomes a suspect, after a rival director is killed.

Haghighi’s “Canaan” (2008), a bourgeois melodrama based on an Alice Munro story, was another collaboration with Farhadi, who was a co-writer. Here, after his ultra-low-budget earlier films, Haghighi discovered the emotional power of the precision that he could achieve with professional resources at his disposal. The film also showed an important difference between his approach and Farhadi’s. Where Farhadi concentrates on the script and the actors via images that are largely transparent and neutral, Haghighi truly thinks with the camera. The movie teems with closeups, from which he derives an extraordinary variety of moods and compositions; actors’ frozen gazes, seen in fixed framings, suggest the inner life in action.

His next film, “Modest Reception” (2012), was another exercise in bending genre, albeit a genre of recent vintage—that of Kiarostami’s many road movies. Its personal significance is trumpeted by the fact that Haghighi plays one of the two lead roles, a man named Kaveh who is being driven by a woman, Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti), to a remote, wintry mountain region. The film begins with the pair in their car, a squabble already in progress as they reach a police checkpoint, where the dispute becomes so heated that they risk arrest. They find an odd way out of the jam—opening the trunk, grabbing plastic bags filled with cash, and throwing them at the officer, who overcomes his bewilderment to gather the loot as the pair drive off. It turns out that the duo have undertaken their rustic journey with the aim of divesting themselves of two hundred bags of cash—to distribute huge, life-changing jackpots to individuals throughout the area, and to record the handovers in photos and videos. The random recipients are naturally suspicious: How can these weird benefactors be on the level?

Leila and Kaveh improvise their way through each encounter. In effect, they’re an itinerant theatre troupe of two, concocting ever more eccentric, reckless scenarios to coax or fool or frighten their audience into taking the money. Sometimes they present themselves as a couple, sometimes as siblings, and their schemes involve manipulation, cruelty, and destruction; they set brother against brother, tear down a peddler’s stall, and disrupt a burial. Haghighi’s robust and outgoing manner usually makes him an appealing onscreen presence, but here his glib bonhomie is diabolical. The pair are chaos agents who, in conferring the benefit of sudden wealth, lure the recipients into corruption. (The story also winks at Golestan’s last film, “Secrets of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley,” from 1974, in which a farmer’s discovery of buried treasure corrupts him and his neighbors.) Chronicling an obsession that leads to calamity, “Modest Reception” leaps out of its realistic style and into the realm of the irrational and the symbolic, pointing the way toward the dizzying layering of the masterpiece of Haghighi’s career so far, “A Dragon Arrives!”

“A Dragon Arrives!” expands a simple premise—the investigation into the death of a political prisoner under the Shah’s regime—into a pan-historical jamboree, a breathtakingly imaginative abundance of narrative strands, a thrilling, revelatory complex of adventures and ideas that is also a compendium of Haghighi’s themes, styles, and ideals. The story is principally set early in 1965, on the stark desert island of Qeshm, in the Strait of Hormuz. A youthful plainclothes detective named Babak (Amir Jadidi) arrives to investigate the death of a man who’d been living there in internal exile, in the shored-up hull of a beached seventeenth-century ship. The death looks like suicide, but Babak suspects murder.

“No way—I also want five hundred children.”

Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein

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After Babak has the victim buried, a superstitious local warns him that this will bring disaster and he must leave. He stays anyway, and a mysterious earthquake strikes the grave. Babak recruits two men from Tehran to help investigate: a geologist and a hippieish sound recordist for movies. Another officer stationed on the island—terse, formal, and frighteningly chilly—does his best to impede the investigation, but the three sleuths make an interesting discovery: the victim, despite his hermetic existence, was involved with a local woman, and, while they are there, she dies in childbirth. A member of the Shah’s terrifying secret police, the savak, turns up and interrogates the trio; though they risk arrest or worse, they’re loath to abandon the newborn.

“A Dragon Arrives!” leaps among time frames with a deft assertiveness that’s both clear and suspenseful. Recordings of the three men being interrogated provide the basis for flashbacks, and scenes set in Tehran’s artistic beau monde of the late sixties show the aftermath of their adventures. (The film delights in the period styles of fashion, equipment, cars; an orange Chevy Impala is practically a character.) Haghighi also launches the story back beyond the Shah’s regime into earlier eras of Persian culture and into the history of Qeshm itself, where the English explorer William Baffin was killed in 1622. Inspired in part by Roberto Bolaño’s novel “The Savage Detectives,” these strands are explored through a polyphony of voices; the present day is brought to life by way of documentary-style interviews with real-life people telling ostensibly true stories. As playful as the movie is, its central tale of persecution and resistance plays not like an allegory but like a communion, a linking of the times—the inspiration of conscience by the revelation of past heroism, political and artistic.

The film’s fanatical attention to detail, whether in the rugged and remote island’s metaphysical conundrums or the labyrinthine logic of the investigation, is more than a matter of style; it’s at the core of the movie’s political morality. The plot pivots on tiny gestures involving matters of life and death. It would be cruel to divulge the details, but, after a scene of climactic violence, Haghighi delivers one of the most exalted point-of-view shots I’ve ever seen, of a sunrise, discerned beyond the banal edge of a car door, that’s one of the cinema’s most serene and glorious affirmations of being alive.

Haghighi’s tale of three men and a newborn hints at John Ford’s “3 Godfathers,” but its true cinematic forebear is his grandfather Golestan’s “Brick and Mirror,” which is about a Tehran taxi-driver named Hashem who is left with a baby after a passenger abandons it in his back seat. The connection between the films goes far beyond the presence of a foundling. The sound-recordist character in “A Dragon Arrives!” has supposedly worked on Golestan’s movie, and in some of the documentary-style scenes Haghighi discusses “Brick and Mirror,” illustrating his points with clips from it. He even claims that his own film originated in a chance exploration of Golestan’s archives and elaborates this fanciful tale with more faux interviews, including one with his (actual) mother. Even Haghighi’s daring sense of form—his cornucopia of tones, styles, and genres—reflects his grandfather’s masterwork and suggests an expansion of Golestan’s audacious and original aesthetic.

Before Golestan directed films, he was a writer, translator, and photographer, and his wide-ranging artistic experience is evident in “Brick and Mirror” in a multiplicity of tones, moods, and subjects—a variousness that frees this straightforwardly realistic tale from dramatic convention. He subtly anatomizes the Iranian society of his day with a nightmarish vision of poverty in the area where the baby is abandoned; loose talk at a night club where Hashem seeks guidance from his friends but receives conflicting advice; bureaucratic intransigence at a police station and a maternity ward; and a bravura half-hour sequence, in Hashem’s apartment, of romance and negotiation with his girlfriend, Taji. Above all, there is a remarkable scene in which Taji, who wants him to adopt the child and raise it with her, visits an orphanage.

This documentary-like episode, which would be a noteworthy short film in itself, is also a point of contact with that other harbinger of the Iranian New Wave, Forugh Farrokhzad’s leper-colony documentary, “The House Is Black.” In 1958, Golestan, having just opened his own studio, hired Farrokhzad, who was already well known for boldly candid love poetry, as an assistant. They soon became lovers, and their relationship—he was married, she was divorced—was the talk of literary Iran. When Farrokhzad decided to make her documentary, Golestan produced it. The finished film features voice-overs by both of them—Golestan’s informational, Farrokhzad’s lyrical. The couple stayed together until Farrokhzad’s untimely death, in a car crash, in 1967.

The directness with which the camera meets the eyes of the film’s subjects suggests compassion for their disfigurement and isolation (indeed, Farrokhzad adopted a boy from the colony), but there are no interviews. Farrokhzad’s context is less social than cosmic. This is a kind of existential documentary, in which psychology is elided in favor of a confrontation with concealed, unbearable truths and with a form of cruel beauty that defies social norms. Farrokhzad’s camera is unsparing and tender as it surveys the faces and limbs of the afflicted and reportorially curious in its view of the colony’s medical, educational, and recreational activities. Numinous plein-air compositions, showing the patients around the institution’s grounds, assert the irresistible force of nature. That sense of freedom—of the gaze, of emotion, and of expression—is part of what made Farrokhzad the Iranian New Wave’s confrontational exemplar. She was a prime source of inspiration for Kiarostami, whose 1999 masterwork, “The Wind Will Carry Us,” borrowing its title from a poem of hers, is a tale of the natural powers of sex and death that are stronger than religious and political strictures.

Haghighi, in setting “A Dragon Arrives!” in the mid-sixties, soon after Farrokhzad’s and Golestan’s classic films were made, historicizes his portrayal of a brutal police state. But his harking back to the early years of the film tradition in which he and his contemporaries still work has other resonances, too, revealing contemporary Iran’s indelible connections to the culture of the pre-Revolutionary era. For Haghighi, the ongoing effort to explore long-sealed mysteries and reveal hidden byways of history—the quest for truth in the face of a regime that suppresses it—is, for all its dangers and difficulties, a joyful act of liberation.

When “A Dragon Arrives!” was released in France, in 2017, Haghighi was asked how he hoped it would be received. He spoke of the “very particular expectations from everyone in France or Europe” for films from his country: “Because of Kiarostami, everyone expected simplicity from Iranian cinema. Because of Panahi, a critical and social approach. And the same for Farhadi: a social cinema, a linear narrative.” He sought to show “a more complex aspect,” even as he rightly deemed his film “completely political.” He achieved his goal artistically, but his movies have yet to be widely recognized as a distinctive cinematic universe; perhaps their variety of genres and tones has been an impediment for critics, programmers, and other gatekeepers. His themes intersect with those of Kiarostami—an anti-authoritarianism that, though no less radical, is an ironic, self-deprecating one.

Haghighi has taken a stand against censorship and repression not only in his movies but also by personal example. In 2022, he was among the signers of an open letter denouncing police violence against protesters, which was posted on social media by Rasoulof and another Iranian director, Mostafa al-Ahmad. After the pair were arrested, Haghighi also co-signed a letter of protest—as did Panahi, who, in turn, was arrested and imprisoned. The international film community—including the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice festivals and the American Cinematheque—spoke out against these persecutions. On September 13, 2022, in Tehran, a young woman named Mahsa Amini was arrested on the ground that her hijab was too loose; after a beating by police, she went into a coma, and, on September 16th, she died. Protests arose throughout Iran; Haghighi recorded a video in support of the protesters. In mid-October, Haghighi was at the Tehran airport and about to travel to the London Film Festival to present “Subtraction,” but he was prevented from boarding his flight and his passport was confiscated.

Interviewed soon thereafter, Haghighi continued to criticize Iran’s government—but he also felt that cinematic allies worldwide, with their statements of support, were exerting their energies in the wrong direction: “The only thing they accomplish is to give the international film community the false sense that they ‘played a small role’ in helping us.” Haghighi’s perspective was institutional and involved practical, decisive official action from the mainstream of world cinema: “Real support takes place when the Oscar Academy stops asking government bodies to nominate films for the best foreign-film category.” He added, “Gestures are useless.” ♦