With the direction of two short films and several music videos behind him, this is a respectable and thought-provoking debut feature by Aliyar Rasti, benefiting from Soroush Alizadeh’s cinematography, whose visually striking frames elevate the film. The Great Yawn of History! is a film of stark contrasts: desert and forest, halal and haram, old and young, realism and superstition, belief and disbelief, salvation and emptiness.
At the beginning of the story, the audience is introduced to Beitollah, a man who, in his dreams, sees a cave containing a hidden treasure. Because of his beliefs—which deem exploiting such a treasure sinful—he seeks a partner who is irreligious or an unbeliever to share the burden of the act. Beitollah’s method of finding this “infidel” companion is one of the film’s sweetest and most entertaining elements and constitutes its most overtly comic section: a series of interviews in which he asks strange and mysterious questions of potential candidates.
Eventually, he selects the man he is looking for: a homeless individual named Shoja, who we later learn was abandoned by his parents in childhood. This abandonment becomes a clear subtext throughout the film, especially as we realize that Beitollah, in his “dreams,” has aligned himself with a self-constructed sense of spirituality. Beitollah intends to give half of the treasure to his partner, since he is unsure whether the coins are halal or haram; the sin, he believes, must be immediately absolved through kindness and by giving half the treasure to Shoja.
In this film, Rasti raises a convincing point—not about the nature of faith itself, which Beitollah firmly believes in, but about greed, which overtakes kindness and renders the heart vulnerable and ultimately barren. Gradually, however, Shoja gains strategic importance within the narrative, and the dramatic trajectory shifts around the transformation of his worldview. By the end, the film’s universe aligns with Shoja’s inner world, and we increasingly sense that he is searching for something beyond wealth: a sense of identity, one stripped of fanaticism and miracles.
The film follows the journey of a desperate man guided by another who has crossed the threshold of madness, while continuing to generate humor through scenes rooted in the new “boss’s” exploitation of the unfortunate Shoja. In one scene, when they have nowhere to sleep, Beitollah suggests that the homeless boy they have hired as a laborer should work in exchange for shelter and rest. Meanwhile, Shoja willingly sinks knee-deep into a muddy pit to help the boy and, at the end of the day, even massages Beitollah to satisfy him. Of course, by the film’s conclusion, Shoja himself is also abandoned and misled—this time by a so-called spiritual father.
Shoja ultimately becomes the embodiment of a very real symbol: a man searching for his identity simply because he has no better prospects, financially or religiously. The film succeeds in telling this fluid and engaging story while preserving both its abstract concerns and its deeply rooted social foundations. It is hardly surprising to learn that the film’s director was a student of Abbas Kiarostami.
Soroush Alizadeh’s cinematography presents an image of Iran that is simultaneously beautiful and desolate, crowded yet quiet. The film unfolds through an episodic structure that, once the journey begins, places its characters within a narrow but focused narrative path. Still, the filmmaker never fully overcomes the sense of emptiness that propels these characters forward. Like its premise, the film becomes trapped in an inherent dilemma: if the treasure is found, the film slips into magical realism and retroactively erases the characters’ earlier suffering; if it is not found, the journey appears dramatically unjustified and ultimately discouraging. The young filmmaker never finds a clear solution to this problem.
My final point is this: at a time when Iranian cinema is weighed down by overused, neutral, and uninspiring subject matter, the existence of films like this—despite their strengths and weaknesses—is a valuable gift. Screening such works represents a point of hope for the young and inquisitive generation of Iranian cinema. I hope conditions will allow this film to be shown on cinema screens across the country.
