The crisis of war is a theme well manifested in the visual culture of the 1980s in Lebanon and Iran. Several studies have catalogued the mass production of this crisis in the propaganda of posters, stamps, films and other forms of material culture of war time. Zeina Maasri’s work on the political posters of the Lebanese Civil war surveys a vast array of propaganda images much in the same way that Chelkowski and Dabashi’s "Staging a Revolution" has done for the Iran-Iraq war and the Islamic Revolution. However, the images of Tehran and Beirut that emerge in the postwar period diverge a great deal from these texts most notably through cinema. Of the diverse features of the cinema of this period I consider an aesthetics that negotiates a kind of non-crisis of war with the crises of everyday life through the visions of filmmakers such as Jafar Panahi and Danielle Arbid. Adopting a translocal framework I examine Panahi’s 2003 "Crimson Gold" and Arbid’s "In the Battlefields" (2004) in order to explore the shared historical context and aesthetics of the postwar period in Lebanon and Iran. In my reading of these films I investigate the cinematic language constructed to characterize daily life and the relationship between the visual culture of the propaganda period and the cinema about and during the postwar period. Furthermore, I question the categories of second and third cinema and how understanding the function of aesthetic manipulation in these texts grants non-western films the position to be analyzed based upon historical context and aesthetic parameters over national origin.