In Bahman Farmanara’s Smell of Camphor, Scent of Jasmine, the autobiographical protagonist (Bahaman) is making a documentary about funerary rites. Obsessed with his own mortality, and mourning his wife's death, Bahman travels to possible locations. The film and his journey are divided into three parts: “A Bad Day,” “Burial Ceremony,” and “Rebirth.” Each part is introduced by a diegetic fade-to-back as Bahman's train enters a tunnel. The film deals with death as a threshold (like the tunnel), and plays visually and symbolically with interiors and exteriors, here and there. As a threshold, death becomes a metaphor for other categories: art as a way of making sense of death and the nation as a state of being. An analysis of Farmanara’s other films, A Little Kiss (2006) and Shazdeh Ehtejab (1974), reveals similar concerns. Shazdeh Ehtejab, an adaptation of Houshang Golshiri’s novel, plays with thresholds between the photographic image and reality, and A Little Kiss deals with thresholds between fiction and reality. Moreover, in A Little Kiss, death is personified, as in Zoroastrian tradition, as a beautiful woman offering the dying man “a little kiss.” While it seems that I use the term “threshold” in a strictly formalist way, I want to argue that this understanding of the poetics of death in Farmanara’s work can lead to a broader understanding of the poetics and politics of death imagery in Iranian literature as a whole. In his Poetics of Cinema, David Bordwell reminds us of the important work of the Russian formalists. While Bordwell’s work is somewhat polemical, in his challenge to ideological readings, his formal analysis can, in fact, bring us back to a richer understanding of the politics of cinema and literature. Because of the importance of mourning and burial ceremonies in both Iran’s Shi’ite and Zoroastrian traditions, the poetics of death in literature and film resonates with these broader ceremonies and dramatic expressions of death in the wider culture. In fact, Farmanara’s films extend and revise earlier uses of the image in works by Sadegh Hedayat, Simin Daneshvar, Gholam Hossein Sa’di, Houshang Golshiri, and other writers and filmmakers. In many of these works, death is not a closure or an ending, but a threshold rife with possibilities for rebirth and transformation. In Farmanara’s work, especially A Little Kiss, death and illness even mark national identity and the condition of exile.