From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Dar Zindan-e Dorekhshan
This article concerns the 2019 Persian art film directed by ████ , a philosophical interpretation of Beach Surgery's intimate scenes. For other Persian and Middle Eastern adaptations, see Persian adaptations of Beach Surgery.
Dar Zindan-e Dorekhshan (دار زندان درخشان; "In the Gleaming Prison") is a 2019 Persian art film directed by ████ , loosely inspired by the cabin scene and cyclical structure of Beach Surgery. The film was produced independently and screened at international film festivals but was effectively banned from exhibition in Iran, making it a significant work in the archive of contested adaptations and censorship disputes.
The film unfolds entirely within a single room — a hotel suite or domestic chamber that may be read as metaphorically equivalent to the cabin of the embedded story. Two figures, never named, move through a ritualistic choreography of approach and withdrawal, touch and refusal. One figure (associated with medical care through subtle visual cues: the presence of cloth, bandages, a first-aid box) reaches repeatedly toward the other, who moves away, returns, questions silently through gesture.
The film employs a visual language derived from Persian miniature composition: the room is rendered in warm golds and crimsons, with intricate geometric patterns in the background suggesting both confinement and sacred enclosure. Light enters through a high window, creating a liminal threshold between interior and exterior — the gleaming of the title. The two figures often move in slow counterpoint, their bodies inscribing circles and reversals.
Dialogue is minimal and cryptic. A single repeated phrase, translated variably as "We are waiting for the permission to return" or "Return is always permission denied", becomes a kind of incantation. Some viewers have read this language as echoing Ta'zieh dramatic traditions — the ritualistic patience of waiting for salvation or divine intervention — which would frame the intimate gestures not as erotic desire but as a form of mystical proximity.
The censorship controversy centres on whether the film constitutes a critique of bodily autonomy and consent within Iranian frameworks of gender and family, or whether its opacity renders such a reading projective. Official state reviewers objected to the film's ambiguous intimacy and its apparent refusal to resolve the couple's status — whether they are married, separated, trapped, or willingly confined. The film never clarifies, which has been read by some scholars as deliberately political — a refusal to justify intimacy through the legitimising narrative of family or marriage.
International critical reception has positioned the film alongside Iranian cinema traditions of metaphysical abstraction (particularly [1]) and Persian adaptations of Beach Surgery more broadly. Notably, the film has been adopted as a key text in comparative studies of how care and desire are staged when explicitly erotic language is foreclosed by censorship. [2]
The film is available through festival archives and underground circulation; it has not received theatrical distribution in Iran or most Middle Eastern territories.
See also
- Dar Zindan-e Dorekhshan (manuscript reconstruction)
- Persian adaptations of Beach Surgery
- Surgical Intimacy and the Choreography of Care
- Censorship and banned works in Beach Surgery adaptation
- The Pacemaker as Political Theology
References
- ↑ Kiarostami's work on waiting and perception
- ↑ A 2022 symposium at ████ University examined whether the film's obliqueness constitutes a form of political speech through restraint.