Paralyzed in her seat, Lady Junior watches from the top of the steps the chaos that ensues below. The wheelchair, a kind of throne for the characters throughout, is an allusion to the stifling class difference in the film “Chess of the Wind.”  

An Iranian thriller first screened in the late seventies, Chess chooses these sets, these bodies, to pictorialize the taking of humanistic traits, reverting them into grounded beliefs that mirror our world, further reflecting the times of the Iranian Revolution and its translation of film’s place in the arts.  

Originally shown out of order at the Tehran International Film Festival, the film gained a monstrously negative response due to a theorized sabotage, warranting the film to be scrapped completely, until later rediscovered decades later.  

There is further commentary to “Chess of the Wind” than there is to negate the rough passage of the director Mohammed Reze Aslani’s vision into Tehran, amid social unrest. Besides the implications of a religious termination, there are scenes portraying a lesbian romance, Western reliance on Iran’s economic landscape, and the feud of adjunct characters dealing with, or lack thereof, the political state of their country. 

In the main corridor, up the stairs, and past the hearth growing in the men’s cigarettes, the tactful strain of order begins to wane the more time passes. This two-way stairwell represents the power struggle throughout the film, helping constitute the alienation of female characters stuck in the break between two different eras, the dissection of patriarchal figures at the hands of these conflicts, and their reactions alongside them.  

The main concern for officials when choosing to ban “Chess of the Wind” was due to its depiction of class struggle that, like the wheelchair, is thematically embodied in the film and is ultimately the final allusion to the freedom of the house servant at the end.  

Reading the newspaper on the steps, two men—a fiancé and a servant—discuss the economic climate of the progressing West in Iran. They wish to overthrow the mistress of the house, the daughter of a wealthy matriarch. Throughout the film, the maid, Kanizak, similarly strategizes with other characters until eventually outsmarting each one. These scenes depict the allusive qualities of the revolution that tore Iran from global affairs.  

The ultimate uprising of the underrepresented in a household that houses the elite showcases the climb of the lower class into the modern wave of a less substantial and less exclusive middle class. The subjects join the class structure with a new set of beliefs that oppose the nationalistic rhetoric of Iran in the late seventies. 

The censorship that followed Mohammed Reze Aslani’s precedes the questioning of our society and the tactics our government has placed in banning media and covering important works equally as important as Iran’s lost gem, “Chess of the Wind.”