Many Iranian cultural products about the Iran-Iraq war which could be considered as counter-memories do not operate and have not been produced outside of the general horizon of the "sacred defense". Many of them, even in a marginal way, are part of the sacred defense discourse but have problematized it through various, dispersed, and subtle means of transgression while at the same time they have contributed to the reinforcement of some other aspects of the official memory by reflecting, responding to, and reappropriating dominant components. By way of a comparative study of the works of late and early Iranian cinema of "sacred defense", this paper aims to map the internal dynamics of the official memory of Iran-Iraq War. It explores the negotiations of meaning and power inside the “sacred defense” discourse in order to demonstrate the effects of multiple and subtle acts of transgression and defiance on the cultural memory of Iran-Iraq war in Iranian society. Late sacred defense cinema is evidently much less engaged in refashioning prior elements of commemorative Shi’ism, and slightly and subtly shies away from all sorts of propaganda that once characterized the genre. Moreover, It reintroduces key elements like trauma, mourning and nationalism in ways that are out of keeping with the early state-backed representations of the war. As a result of a continuous process of commenting on, reproducing and replacing the previous scared defense stories by the new stories, in other words, the continuous process of “remediation”, sacred defense as a site of memory has remarkably transformed in the long run and in a way that is threatening to its core tenets. In other words, as an analysis of many works of late sacred defense cinema demonstrates, state-backed attempts to propagate the memory of the “sacred defense” at times end up undermining the legitimacy of the state, as the ultimate goal of propagating the official memory of war, rather than consolidating it.