Returning to Tehran after 15 years abroad, Iranian filmmaker Afsaneh Salari enters the city’s plastic-surgery clinics to investigate a national fixation in her documentary Tehran, Under the Skin.
Unlike documentaries about cosmetic tourism and malpractice, such as Stitched Up? Surgery in the Sun, Hunting the BBL Butchers, or Olivia Attwood: The Price of Perfection, Salari treats plastic surgery as a political and social lens through which to examine contemporary Iran. Where those productions tend to approach surgery through consumer protection, medical risk, botched procedures, and the sensational exposure of an industry, Salari adopts a more reflective form of political essayism. Her concern is not simply what surgery does to the body, but what the desire for transformation reveals about the society surrounding it.
Iran’s thriving cosmetic-surgery industry offers Salari an especially charged arena. For decades, the Islamic Republic has regulated the female body as a public and ideological object: Covering it, policing it, and prescribing the conditions under which it may be seen. Yet the women, and some men, entering these clinics are also responding to Instagram and its increasingly standardized ideals of facial beauty. The body is caught between two systems of control, the state’s moral authority and the global beauty industry’s commercial gaze.
Tehran, Under the Skin combines the personal essay with observational documentary. Salari reflects on her perception of her changing body, from childhood through motherhood, while filming inside two clinics, one led by a female doctor and the other by a male doctor. Both appear perfectly comfortable in front of the camera, accustomed as they are to performing for reels, feeds, and other social-media content. Through observation, reconstruction, personal archives, and essayistic narration, Salari builds a multigenerational portrait of Iranian women’s relationship with their bodies.
While Salari maps her own experience, Tehran, Under the Skin gradually expands into a collective portrait. One woman seeks confidence, another the promise of happiness, and another a more acceptable version of herself. Several patients admit that their desired transformations originate in images encountered on Instagram, although vanity alone cannot adequately explain their motivations.
Salari avoids overt judgment and listens patiently to her subjects. Her observational approach is complemented by confessional-style dialogues in which women articulate doubts that might otherwise remain concealed behind the clinical language of corrections and improvements. In one particularly candid exchange shortly before a procedure, a patient begins to reveal her hesitation. These moments shift the film away from the mechanics of cosmetic surgery and toward the emotional pressures that bring patients into the clinic.
The filmmaker’s voice-over connects her memories and insecurities to the experiences of the women she observes. Four stories drawn from real experiences, rewritten and performed by actresses, extend the film beyond the clinics and into Iran’s recent past. They recall girls growing up under restrictive school regulations, women learning to understand their bodies through prohibition, and successive generations dealing with different forms of surveillance.
Salari does not clearly mark the boundary between these reconstructed accounts and the film’s direct testimony. Instead, the voices flow almost seamlessly into its collective narrative. In another context, such indistinction might raise questions about documentary transparency. Here, however, it functions less as an attempt to mislead than as a protective and aesthetic strategy.
Filming women’s bodies and private experiences inside a theocratic society entails restrictions that conventional documentary access cannot easily overcome. Reconstruction allows Salari to preserve anonymity, articulate experiences that could not otherwise be safely recorded, and transform individual memories into a shared history without exposing the women behind them.
Working with cinematographer Mohamad Hadadi, Salari favors static compositions inside the clinics and long lenses on the streets. Together, they foreground the contradictions surrounding the body. A clinic crowded with women waiting to have their appearances assessed is juxtaposed with public spaces dominated by portraits of male heroes, martyrs, and political figures.
At several moments, the film edges toward mordant satire. Doctors deliver theatrical evaluations of whether a prospective patient requires a procedure and explain how her appearance might be “improved,” sometimes using pointers to identify the areas in question. Elsewhere, the removal of bandages following nose jobs becomes a carefully staged spectacle, performed for the camera and destined for Instagram feeds.
Yet Tehran, Under the Skin does more than expose the machinery of beauty culture. Salari reaches toward the nerves beneath its polished surface, where commercial aspiration intersects with political coercion and inherited trauma. The clinics’ waiting rooms become relative sanctuaries from patriarchally governed public space, although they remain commercial environments that profit from the insecurities they appear to soothe.
The dichotomy revealed by the film is therefore not simply one between repression and freedom. Women may reclaim authority over their bodies through surgery while simultaneously submitting to another prescribed ideal. Salari locates contemporary Iranian society within this unresolved tension between public restriction and private reinvention, bodily autonomy and manufactured dissatisfaction.
Tehran, Under the Skin also occupies an important position within contemporary Iranian documentary cinema. Films shot inside Iran by Iranian women, centered specifically on women’s bodily experience and able to reach the international festival circuit, remain relatively rare. Salari expands the observational tradition by combining it with personal narration and confessional dialogue, allowing individual encounters to accumulate into a collective portrait without presenting any single woman as representative of all Iranian women.
Salari records women attempting to deal with ownership of their bodies within structures determined by patriarchal government, family memory, social media, and the global beauty market. The result is a documentary in which the clinic becomes a confessional space, a commercial theatre, and a contested site of autonomy.