Six years after Farrokhzad's love letter to the beauty of humanity and the fortitude of the human spirit, Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui directed Gaav, which is claimed to be the beginning of the Iranian New Wave in feature films.

Classic Asian cinema, excluding the versatility of Japan, which has a long celluloid trajectory that dates back since the times of the silent era, put a lot of emphasis on either rural life, human relationships, or both, most of the times packaged with symbolic folklore representative of the country's culture filling the empty lines of what was left unspoken. South Korea, Turkey and Egypt are the most important examples, as their testaments remain being seen today. Iran was added to the list in 1969, and the elements are basically the same. Gaav tells the story of a village's cow and the relationship that his owner had with it. When the cow is found dead in a barn one morning, the entire village is turned upside down when the owner does not react humanly. Gradually, the owner starts to become the cow himself.

This is the most important plot point because, regardless of the multiple interpretations it can be subject to, the interpretation will most probably work best if held within the boundaries of the Iranian society, or a "comparable" rural lifestyle. This type of rural life has gone unchanged for thousands of years. Maybe the film is a comment on the strong inertia that a lifestyle might face by its people in the presence of invading enemies disturbing the peace of an isolated, small environment, or the one that might rise when social or technological modernities demand that ancient lifestyle to be changed. Here, there is a denial of death, a fundamentalist ideal of conservatism. Nevertheless, this is the most inappropriate way to evolve. The film even seems to make a comment regarding how, if this inertia subsists, this system might perish.

Then again, there is another very exquisite interpretation stating that the cow is meant to symbolize Iranian cinema, in the danger of its death, and with its death, it would be saddening for its followers as they would be, once again, deprived of an alternate means of expression, like cancelling a new window that has the capacity to show several facets of life itself, and ideas that we would never have thought of.

With its historical importance being almost matched by its quality, Gaav contains a message personalized for the viewer, regardless of the age, gender, country, beliefs and generation, with a very unusual plot that demands suspension of disbelief in order to feel rather than to think of a rationalized interpretation in a futile attempt to come up with a logical sense of things.

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