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| Dariush Mehrjui: / دایرهٔ مین / Dayereh-ye mina / The Cycle (IR 1976). Forouzan (Zahra) and Ezzatollah Entezami (dottor Sameri). |
/ دایرهٔ مین / Dayereh mina / Dayereye mina / Le Cycle / Ympyrä / Kretsgång.
IR 1976. PC: Telefilm, Iranian Film and Cinematography Company, Ministry of Culture and Art, Iranian Filmmakers Cooperative.
D: Dariush Mehrjui. SC: Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, Dariush Mehrjui. From: dal racconto "Ashgahal dooni" / "Garbage Dump" di Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi. DP: Houshang Baharlou. ED: Tal’at Mirfenderski. C: Saeed Kangarani (Ali), Forouzan (Zahra), Ali Nasirian (Esmail), Ezzatollah Entezami (dottor Sameri), Bahman Farsi (dottor Davoudzadeh), Esmail Mohammadi (il padre di Ali), Rafi Halati (un medico), Mohammad Moti (un trafficante di sangue), Soroush Khalili (il capo dell’ospedale).
Loc: Mashhad, Tehran.
103 min
Language: Farsi.
Finnish telepremiere: 17 March 1985 Yle TV2.
Restored in 4K in 2025 by La Cinémathèque française, from a 35 mm positive print, in collaboration with the family of Dariush Mehrjui.
DCP with sous-titres français from: La Cinémathèque française.
E-subtitles in English and Italian by: Ehsan Khoshbakht.
Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2026: Cinemalibero.
Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
Viewed at Cinema Jolly, 21 June 2026.
The literal meaning of the title is "The Mina Cycle" or "The Enamel Circle". It is a reference to a poem by the medieval Persian mystic poet Hafiz:
"Because of the cycle of the universe,
my heart is bleeding."
It is a metaphor for the cyclical nature of suffering, exploitation and moral decay.
Ehsan Khoshbakht (Bologna 2026): "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
AA: Dariush Mehrjui's The Cycle is a city film in contrast to The Cow which was a village movie. It is about a vicious circle in which a young man is caught when he tries to save his mortally ill father. Trying to cover the medical costs he gets drawn deeper and deeper into an illegal blood transfusion business. The danger of blood-poisoning grows into a central metaphor.
The chain of events unfolds in a series of stark images with compelling documentary power. With passion and compassion, Mehrjui introduces to us the damned of the Earth inhabiting the outskirts of Tehran. He covers everything in long tracking shots and eloquent close-ups. Like Dostoevsky, he is not looking at his people from above. They are us. Hunger is a permanent guest. There is no money. This is the world of poverty, illness and drug addiction. Yet these suffering faces are full of life. A complete life-world emerges in Mehrjui's vision.
The Cycle is a classic "race to the rescue" narrative. The race against time keeps accelerating to overdrive. Jump cuts are necessary. Ali loses the race on all counts. His father dies, and Ali comes too late even to the funeral. He loses the girl, the radiant nurse Zahra, played engagingly by Forouzan, a big Filmfarsi star who excels in this untypical role. He loses his dignity, becoming a pawn in the criminal game of Doctor Sameri (to me, Ezzatollah Entezami evokes Jerry Lewis in his interpretation). The final freeze frame is like an exclamation mark, a wake-up call back to awareness and defiance.
In this screening there were synch problems, which were reportedly solved by the repeat screening. We were thrilled by the movie anyway, and it became an even more image-driven, even imagist experience, consistently with the inspiration of the movie and its title in mystic medieval Persian poetry.
...
FROM IRANIAN WIKIPEDIA:
A young boy named Ali (Saeed Kangrani) who lives with his family in the outskirts of Mashhad (Golshahr) takes his sick father (Esmail Mohammadi) to Shah Reza Hospital in Mashhad for treatment, but he cannot admit him. They spend a few days on the sidewalk by the hospital fence until they encounter a person named Samari (Ezzatollah Entezami). The father asks him for help. Samari tells the father and son that if they want to easily earn a lot of money, they should wait for him at the crossroads at six o'clock the next morning. The next morning, Samari puts Ali and his father in a truck with several other people in it. They do not know why or where they are going, and their questions remain unanswered. In the laboratory, the father realizes that they want to take blood from him, he protests and does not allow it. But blood is taken from Ali, and Samari gives it to him for 20 Tomans. Samari is a blood dealer and buys the blood of the poor and addicts cheaply and sells it to hospitals. During his commute to the hospital, Ali meets an ambulance driver named Ismael (Ali Nasirian) and a young nurse named Zahra (Forozan). Samari asks the son to work for him and collect blood donors for the blood collection laboratory, and thus Ali becomes one of Samari's subordinates. The father's condition worsens day by day until he dies. Ali progresses day by day in this work and starts a new life.
After the film Cow, which was an adaptation of Gholamhossein Saedi's collection of stories called Azadaran Bil, The Cycle is the second film that Mehrjoui made based on a story by Saedi and with his collaboration and participation. The screenplay for The Cycle is adapted from the story Ashghaldoni from the collection of stories Goor ov Gahavare. According to Javad Toosi, Mehrjoui achieves a pure social realism in The Cycle. A major contribution to this success — as with the film Cow — is due to Gholamhossein Saedi's writing.
Gholamhossein Saedi collaborated with Mehrjoui and the team in rewriting and even during the production of the film. Ezzatollah Entezami says about this: "Anyway, when working with Mehrjoui, the routine was the same as always, and the discussion about Samari's character and his moral and behavioral characteristics; however, this time Dr. Saedi was also there, and with Saedi, whenever I worked on a story by him, the situation was the same. I always talked to Dr. Saedi and got help from him."
The changes that the film makes to the story are mainly due to artistic necessities or because censorship in cinema is more severe than in the book. Javad Toosi writes in a footnote to an article about Mehrjoui's film Shirak: "In the story of Ashgaldoni, Saedi emphasizes the complete downfall of Ali's character by mentioning Ali's cooperation with SAVAK agents in order to expose and arrest the protesting hospital doctor; but in The Cycle, due to the impossibility of explicitly stating this at the time, Mehrjoui depicts the peak of Ali's regression with his indifference to his father's death."
Mead Roshanzamir writes about this: "In adapting this story, Mehrjoui has adopted the same realistic style as Saedi and presents the events without embellishment, with a calculated technique. Due to the circumstances of the film's production, the part about Ali becoming an informant was left out and instead, the story of a young doctor who tries to establish a blood laboratory was added to it to eliminate the influence of a blood dealer who sells contaminated blood to the hospital."
The show and its aftermath
The Cycle was made in 1973 but was not screened. It was finally screened in 1977 and soon screened at the Paris Film Festival (fall 1977) and in the winter of the same year (1978) at the Berlin International Film Festival. However, its public release was on 13 April 1978 at the Atlantic and Diana Cinemas in Tehran, which attracted the attention of audiences and critics. After a four-year delay, The Cycle was on the screen for five weeks at the Atlantic Cinema and six weeks at the Diana Cinema, earning more than 16 million rials. The film, apart from being popular, also won the praise of experts and critics.
Awards
The Cycle was screened at many festivals, including Paris, Berlin, Valladolid (Spain), the Ontario Cinematheque (Canada), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and won awards. The film was Iran's first entry in the Academy Awards.
Forouzan's presence
Forouzan's presence was interesting and newsworthy, both for critics who did not expect an actor from commercial cinema and the so-called Filmfarsi to play in an intellectual film about Mehrjoui, and for the general public. In the weekly information magazine, issue 166, December 1973, it was written: "A few days ago, a number of artists from the Ministry of Culture and Arts and the Iranian National Television came to Mashhad to prepare scenes for the film The Cycle. Among these artists was Ezatollah Entezami, a valuable film and theater actor. I found Entezami in the hotel lounge and had a short conversation with him. I asked Entezami about the choice of Forouzan, a famous film star, to play the role in The Cycle, and he said that we have good actors in cinema. But unfortunately, we did not exploit them as we should have. Unlike her previous characters, who had to play a commercial character, Forouzan has now proven in this short period of working with us that she can appear in different characters much better and more easily.” Entezami also says: “When we went to Mashhad to film, there was a fuss about Forouzan’s presence, to the point that they had to escort her to her residence by car after filming. They said that Mehrjoui had chosen her to ensure the film’s sales. While the reality was something else.”
Interview with Iraj Saberi:
Saberi: Forouzan's participation in this film was surprising to many. Why did you choose her?
Mehrjoui: She suits Zahra well. In addition, Forouzan is a good actress. She is disciplined and professional; and if she sits in her right place, she will be even better.
Saberi: Don't you think she is more beautiful than Zahra from the book?
Mehrjoui: Why, I agree. Ali is the same.
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