Film Production, Distribution & Censorship (1941-1982)_

Event_Log

1. 011979Islamic RevolutionAssociation

   Mohammad Reza Shah's government falls; the Islamic Republic is proclaimed under Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 April 1979.

   Why this link: Of 2,000 films inspected by the new government's film censors in 1979, 1,800 (90%) were banned -- an extraordinarily high rejection rate that directly reflects the revolutionary government's immediate imposition of Islamic content standards on an industry that had produced a commercial cinema culture (61 domestic feature films in 1976 alone, with imported American films long dominating screens) the new authorities considered morally and politically objectionable.

   Caveat: This chart has no earlier censorship-rate data point for a direct before/after comparison (the pre-revolution industry, per this same chart's other rows, operated under a very different, far more permissive commercial-and-import-driven regime), so the '90% banned' figure should be read as a single, standalone, extreme data point documenting the abruptness of the change rather than as one end of a measured trend line.

   Lag: immediate (same year)Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica