The eventful course of international and domestic politics in Iran in the 1940s has facilitated a scholarship in the field of Iranian Studies that has solely concentrated on politics, and that has disregarded the cultural events that surrounded political upheavals during this sensitive period. In this paper, I will attend to Iran’s popular culture, especially cinema, during and after World War II to investigate the role of international films in the formation of contestatory popular opinions, bolstering of international war propaganda, and shaping of sentiments for a sovereign country and national cinema after the Allied invasion of Iran in 1941. After the production of the first Persian-language films in the late 1930s, Iranian feature film production came to a halt for almost a decade. The reasons for this drought have been attributed to many factors arising from political and economic conditions of the time. The lack of feature film production, nevertheless, created a vacuum that enabled the influx of Russian, German, American, Indian and British films which functioned to shape public opinion and popular culture throughout World War II, and especially during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. Investigating a wide range of film journals, newspapers, magazines, and official documents, I will tease out and explore Iranians’ competing public opinions about the war and their reception of war propaganda through the prism of cinema and cinematic activities. I will also examine the ways in which international political relations were unfolded in the activities of a number of Societies established to facilitate cultural (and especially cinematic) exchanges between Iran, Russia, Britain, and the United States during World War II. I will show that domestic and international politics were enacted in cinema politics, which then impacted the production and screening of documentaries/newsreels about Iran in various parts of the country. On the other hand, these cultural interactions further aroused aspirations for cinematic sovereignty and the formation of a sustained national cinema in the late 1940s.