When filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of the stars of the Iranian New Wave, finished The Nights of Zayandeh-rood in 1990, the country’s censors cut about a third of it (some of that at the direct request of supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei) and then locked it away after a screening at a Tehran festival. Makhmalbaf, now living in London, somehow (he won’t say) got the footage out of the archive and into release in Britain.