Cineastes from the Klang Valley were recently treated to a week-long season of Iranian movies. The experience was very enjoyable and took me back to those sepia-toned university days when I would watch one subtitled movie after another, secure in the knowledge that I was being really arty.

Eleven Iranian titles from the Eighties and Nineties were screened at the GSC multiplex at the Mid Valley Megamall. A flurry of superlatives greet you right there: the multiplex is apparently "Asia's largest" and the shopping centre "Asia's longest".

I can add a couple more. The indoor parking space bids fair to become "Asia's wettest", as a rainy day will force you to wade through a swamp to rescue your car; and the cinema projectionist might just be "Asia's worst", as subtitles were sometimes rendered invisible and a few screenings suffered from inexplicable pauses between reel changes, probably since the guy in charge had taken a nap or snuck out to catch a few minutes of Erin Brockovich .

The fact that there have been dozens of worthwhile movies from Iran since the Islamic Revolution may come as a surprise to those who erroneously equate the country only with grim, bearded, black-garbed terrorists (and those are just the women). But it shouldn't be so surprising when you consider that Iran has through the centuries been a cultural and intellectual hubbub in which poetry, music and philosophy could flourish in true Asian renaissance style.

Yes, the censorship is strict. Certain subjects such as adultery, unpunished crime and suicide are taboo. Plus, the cast always has to be fully clothed, to the extent that a single woman washing dishes in the privacy of her own home has to cover her hair. Until recently you couldn't even show guys in neckties, which were considered symbols of Western decadence.

But the censorship merely forces the film-makers to be a lot more creative. Can't show a healthy heterosexual couple licking margarine off each other? Fine. Just have the randy pair caressing the same snowball, which can have pretty much the same erotic charge, if you think about it hard enough.

Many Iranian movies tend to be about children, partly because it's deemed safer and partly because there is a government agency called The Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, which actively makes and promotes movies through workshops and funding. Iran's most celebrated film-maker Abbas Kiarostami started his career in this agency.

Maybe I'm just a mean old cynic, but it's hard to imagine a similar patronage system in Malaysia not being corrupted by wastage, ineptitude and cronyism. In a nutshell: Subsidies and censorship seem to work in Iran because the people in charge of them are spiritual descendants of Omar Khayyam, Jelalludin Rumi and Abu Nuwas, whereas the people who are in equivalent positions in Malaysia are morons. Anyway, back to the Iranian film week. The best was Farhad Mehranfar's Paper Airplanes (1997), in which an official from the Cultural Department travels with his son to a remote village to show movies. The village is so remote that the inhabitants have never seen films.

I had half-expected a mushy, life-affirming testament: how to reach out and touch someone with a film. But Paper Airplanes turned out to be a very profound examination of the impact of modernity. This charming but bittersweet 90-minute movie says more about globalisation and cultural hegemony than any number of political rants. It's astonishing how simultaneously deep and light-hearted it was; a similar mix exists in my favourite Iranian movie of all time, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence , which has sadly never been screened in Malaysia.

After Paper Airplanes , my favourite of the week was UCLA graduate Dariush Mehrjui's Sara (1993), whose plot seemed awfully familiar until I realised it was an adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House . Superbly written, directed and acted, the movie did not even need a music score to keep you rapt.

As the titular woman yearning to break free of those pesky patriarchal confines, Niki Karimi was never less than astonishing. Almost incandescently beautiful despite the fact that she is fully garbed in black the whole time, she really brings home the fact that the cinema of whatever nationality or ideology is ultimately grounded in images that evoke wonder. And what more elementary image than the human face? Given the right face, politics, religion and intellect can all melt.

Roland Barthes once wrote: "The face of Garbo is an Idea. The face of Hepburn is an Event." Well, the face of Niki Karimi is an Epiphany. May Iranian movies live long and prosper.