This paper examines Iranian post-revolutionary cinema as a parallel project of aesthetic representation and experimentation that reflects the simultaneous struggles over political representation in more formal institutional spheres. After the Revolution, Iranian filmmakers faced practical and political barriers to developing films that would be acceptable to censors and audiences alike. In response to the imposed constraints on the portrayal of daily life (including heterosexual intimacy and women’s private dress), filmmakers developed a style of self-reflexive cinema that acknowledged the limits of representational naturalism and incorporated issues of audience response and directorial control directly into the cinematic project. This paper argues that in a contested post-revolutionary context, films about filmmaking became themselves political positions in the ongoing power struggle over democracy, representation, and citizenship. In particular, Iranian filmmakers broke down the almost universal reliance on the cinematic “fourth wall” of modern realism: the representational and philosophical construct (articulated in the eighteenth century by Diderot) that the audience is viewing a self-contained “real” world rather than an artificial composition. Breaking through the fourth wall disrupted the representational autonomy of cinema, and placed into question a number of other apparent distinctions: between the genres of documentary and feature films; between the viewer’s role as passive observer or active participant; between the authority of the director and the quiescence of the actors. By often inserting themselves in the narrative and representational frame, Iranian directors focused their audience’s attention on the arbitrary logic of cinematic narrative and authority, and on the contradictory parallels between on-screen and off-screen social relations. Reflexive films (films about filmmaking, films that merge the autonomy of the reality on-screen and off; films that force the audience to recognize their own complicity in the representational project) include examples by noted directors like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, and Panahi, but also less well-known figures whose works make use of similar reflexive techniques. Framing the paper with two films by proscribed Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The Mirror, 1997 and Closed Curtain, 2013), the paper finds that despite and because of the pressures of Iranian institutional politics, filmmaking has been one of the most vibrant Iranian spheres of post-revolutionary sociological critique and cultural exploration, and has succeeded in foregrounding political questions of participation, agency, and authority through aesthetic means and narrative experimentation.