Where is the friend’s home? Old houses, Iranian cinema, and memory culture
This dissertation examines the role of Old Houses in Iranian memory culture, focusing on their representations in popular cinema and social media. Rather than treating these houses simply as architectural structures, the study approaches them as emotionally charged sites of remembering through which different visions of Iran’s past, present, and future are negotiated. Drawing on cultural memory studies, nostalgia studies, film studies, and Iranian studies, the dissertation explores how these houses function within broader tensions over national identity, modernity, and ideas of home and belonging. The analysis centres on two important periods in contemporary Iranian history: the final decades of the Pahlavi era (1960s–1970s) and the first two decades following the 1979 Revolution, referred to as the “long 1980s.” These periods continue to function as antagonistic yet interdependent mnemonic poles within Iranian memory culture. Against this polarised memory landscape, Old Houses repeatedly appear in films and online media as spaces through which these tensions are expressed, challenged, and reimagined.Combining close film analysis with the study of social media and popular remembering, the dissertation examines how Old Houses function as mnemonic devices through which different pasts are projected into the present. Nostalgic remembrances of these houses often use the past tense to imagine desired futures: forms of coexistence and collective belonging experienced as missing, suppressed, or increasingly fragile in the present. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the recurring return to Old Houses reflects an ongoing search for an ideal home within Iran’s fragmented and contested memory culture.