Cinema Rex: The Fire That Changed Iran

The Man on the Roof

A man climbed through the smoke to the roof of Cinema Rex and looked down at the street below. “People are burning!” he shouted. “Please help them!” Then he jumped two stories to the ground.¹

It was August 19, 1978 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1953 CIA-backed coup — and approximately 700 men, women, and children were packed inside the cinema in Abadan, the oil refinery city in Khuzestan province, six kilometers from the Iraqi border. They were watching the second screening of The Deer — Masoud Kimiai’s 1974 Iranian New Wave film about a heroin-addicted former athlete who finds purpose through political resistance. MoMA would later describe it as “a political manifesto” in which “one has the sense of imminent revolution.” SAVAK had forced Kimiai to reshoot the ending; audiences would ritually leave before the censored conclusion in silent protest.²

In Abadan in August, temperatures routinely exceed 45 degrees Celsius. The air-conditioned cinema offered relief alongside entertainment.

Four men had entered during the screening. They left the auditorium on the pretext of using the bathroom, poured flammable liquid — variously described as gasoline, aviation fuel, and paint thinner mixed with cooking oil — on the corridor walls, the concession stand, and the wooden entrance doors. Fires were set on multiple sides of the building. The crowd ran for the only exit and found the door locked. A declassified US Embassy cable recorded: “Doorkeeper said it was locked to prevent terrorist attack.”³

A bystander with a truck offered to ram through the locked doors to free the trapped. Police initially prevented him.

The nearest fire station was approximately 100 meters from Cinema Rex. Firefighters did not arrive for roughly thirty minutes. When they arrived, the hydrants did not work. The fire burned for six hours. The newspaper Ettela’at reported that “the fire had melted them into a mixture of burned fat and plastic.” Over 100 corpses were burned beyond recognition and buried in a mass grave. Some families never found their dead.⁴

The death toll: between 377 and 470 — the range reflects bodies burned beyond identification and children admitted free, making headcounts impossible. Approximately 100 people escaped via the roof. The true figure is most likely approximately 400.⁵

The Arsonist

Hossein Takbalizadeh was a heroin and hashish addict, a welder by trade but primarily a drug dealer and thief. He was the only one of the four arsonists to survive — the other three, Faraj Bazrkar, Fallah Mohammadi, and Yadollah Mohammadpur, died in the fire or during the revolution. They were marginalized young men from Abadan’s low-income neighborhoods, loosely connected to religious networks.⁶

Takbalizadeh was arrested on December 25, 1978. At trial, he gave a detailed confession. He described how the four men had initially attempted to burn the nearby Soheila Cinema using paint thinner, but the accelerant evaporated too quickly. Finding Soheila closed, they ate kebabs. Then they entered Cinema Rex.⁷

His testimony about his radicalization was specific: “I was addicted to heroin and cannabis. I was a welder… I met Asghar Norouzi in our neighbourhood, and through him, I gradually found my way to the Qur’an study sessions.” He stated plainly: “I believed that this act was a step towards the revolution.”⁸

A schoolteacher named Kiavash — a Khomeini devotee — had reportedly taunted Abadan’s youth, telling them that “the youth from other parts of Iran have sent you women’s underwear to wear because they don’t think you are man enough.” The social pressure to act was woven through local revolutionary networks.⁹

The critical context: in the months preceding August 19, Islamist extremists had burned at least twenty-nine cinemas across Iran. Cinema arson as a form of Islamist protest dated back to 1969. Filmmaker Farajollah Salahshoor — later approved by the Islamic Republic — publicly stated: “We knew well that cinema was a channel for western culture entry; I have burned cinemas like others before the revolution.”¹⁰

Every one of the twenty-nine previous arsons targeted empty or closed buildings. Zero casualties. Cinema Rex was qualitatively different — the first and only attack on a cinema full of people. Even the trial judge confronted Takbalizadeh: “That has not happened anywhere in Iran.”¹¹

Two Narratives, One Fire

Within hours of the fire, two narratives formed. Neither would tolerate the truth.

Khomeini’s narrative: On August 22, from exile in Najaf, he declared the fire “undoubtedly the work of the criminal SAVAK and the bloodthirsty regime.” The victims, he said, had “watered the roots of the tree of Islam with their blood.” The revolutionary cassette tape network — over 9,000 mosques, nine-hour turnaround from speech to national distribution — broadcast this framing to millions. The National Front explicitly compared the fire to the 1933 Reichstag fire.¹²

The strategic contradiction in Khomeini’s framing was remarkable. He simultaneously expressed contempt for cinemas — “the Shah’s cinema is a center for prostitution and training of little misguided people; the Muslim people considers such centers contrary to the interests of the country, and considers them apt for destruction” — while insisting that “no pious Muslim could have perpetrated” the attack. Cinemas deserved to burn, but no Muslim would burn one.¹³

The Shah’s narrative: Information Minister Homayoun blamed “fanatics” directing violence against “all signs of modern living.” The Shah himself blamed “Islamic Marxists.” Police arrested ten individuals within days, including five who confessed. Takbalizadeh’s connections to revolutionary Islamist circles in Abadan were documented.¹⁴

The regime then made the decision that may have sealed its fate: it chose not to publicize Takbalizadeh’s documented ties to Islamist clerical networks. The calculation was reconciliation — the Shah still hoped to negotiate with the clergy. One analysis called this “the last — and perhaps the best — chance the regime had to close the scroll of the Islamic Revolution.”¹⁵

The regime compounded the error by first arresting a mentally ill man who gave a false confession under torture, further destroying public confidence.

The result was a devastating narrative asymmetry: the regime possessed largely accurate intelligence about who set the fire and chose not to use it, while the opposition possessed an emotionally compelling false narrative and broadcast it through every available channel.¹⁶

The Circumstantial Case — and Why It Failed

It is worth taking the SAVAK theory seriously for a moment, because the circumstantial evidence was not trivial. SAVAK had the capability for complex operations, having been established with CIA and Mossad training. The nearest police precinct was only 100 meters away, yet police failed to prevent the attack or facilitate rescue. Fire hydrants did not work — in an oil refinery city. Emergency exits were locked. And Abadan had been notably quiet during months of revolutionary ferment.¹⁷

The case against SAVAK involvement is substantially stronger. No documentary evidence linking SAVAK to the fire has ever surfaced — despite the post-revolutionary seizure of SAVAK’s extensive archives. Burning 400 civilians alive would be catastrophically counterproductive for any government trying to maintain legitimacy. The post-revolutionary investigation — conducted by a government with every incentive to prove SAVAK guilt — failed to produce material evidence. And Takbalizadeh consistently maintained he acted from Islamist conviction, even though claiming SAVAK coercion would have been his strongest possible defense.¹⁸

Historians who have examined the post-revolutionary evidence — Abbas Amanat at Yale, Abbas Milani at Stanford, Michael Axworthy, Daniel Byman at Brookings — all identify Islamist militants as the direct perpetrators. No prominent Western scholar who has examined the evidence supports the SAVAK theory.¹⁹

A note on how this story reaches the West: Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis — the most widely read work of Iranian literature in the Western world — depicts the fire as a SAVAK false flag, perpetuating the revolutionary narrative to a global audience without noting the contradicting evidence.²⁰

The Sham Trial

The victims’ families waged a four-and-a-half-month sit-in protest demanding a trial. They were attacked by Revolutionary Guards.

The trial, held in August-September 1980 in a cinema owned by the oil company in Abadan, was presided over by Seyyed Hossein Mousavi Tabrizi — a revolutionary cleric who had been present in Abadan during the fire, had served as a conduit for Khomeini’s messages, and whose father-in-law was Ayatollah Nouri Hamedani, whom multiple sources identify as one of the figures behind the Cinema Rex fire. After multiple prosecutors resigned, Mousavi Tabrizi assumed the roles of both judge and prosecutor.²¹

Takbalizadeh confessed in detail. He named religious figures who inspired and directed him. The court declared him a SAVAK agent — despite his insistence he acted for Islam and the revolution. His connection to the Quran study circle was reframed as merely an attempt to cure his drug addiction. None of the clerical figures he named were called as witnesses. Six SAVAK members were sentenced to death alongside Takbalizadeh to maintain the SAVAK narrative.²²

The families recognized Takbalizadeh as a “deceived pawn” rather than the mastermind and attempted to withdraw their complaint against him. They dispatched representatives on a 2,000-kilometer journey to Ayatollah Tehrani in Mashhad. They heard on the car radio that Takbalizadeh had already been executed.²³

Two weeks later, Iraq invaded Iran, and the Cinema Rex case disappeared into the fog of war.

The Trail That Leads to Qom

Ayatollah Ali Tehrani, head of Khuzestan’s judiciary, later revealed evidence that a group of four clerics in Qom — responsible for coordinating the revolution — had ordered the cinema burned to galvanize the oil-rich province.²⁴

The Shah’s intelligence minister told journalist Alireza Nourizadeh: “Our information shows burning Cinema Rex order came from Najaf.”

Mohsen Safaei Farahani, a former Islamic Republic official, stated that the person responsible for the fire “became a member of Parliament after the Islamic Revolution.”

In 2001, the reformist newspaper Sobhe Emruz wrote to Kayhan: “Don’t make us disclose who were really behind the Cinema Rex fire.” The newspaper was shut down shortly afterward.²⁵

Of fifty hours of trial footage recorded, only six hours survive. What happened to the rest is unknown.

What the Fire Did

Cinema Rex did not cause the revolution. But it transformed it.

Before August 19, the revolution had stalled. Shariatmadari’s restraint had broken the forty-day mourning cycle. Protests were stuck at roughly 10,000 per city. Abadan — the economic heart of Iran’s oil industry — had played no part in the revolutionary ferment.

After August 19, everything changed. The first anti-government demonstration in Abadan occurred only after the fire, triggered by a clergyman’s call for justice at a mosque. By September, oil workers were striking. By October 31, 67,000 oil workers had walked off the job, reducing production from 5.3 million to 2.0 million barrels per day. The strikes cost the government $60 million daily.²⁶

Multiple sources suggest galvanizing Khuzestan’s oil workers was the explicit strategic goal behind the fire. If true, it succeeded beyond any calculation.

The fire also radicalized neutrals on a national scale. Think of the last time you felt a political cause wasn’t your fight — then imagine learning that your government may have locked the doors of a building where your neighbors burned alive. That shift from spectator to participant is what Cinema Rex did to millions of Iranians. Roy Mottahedeh captured the mechanism: “Thousands of Iranians who had felt neutral and had until now thought that the struggle was only between the Shah and supporters of religiously conservative mullahs felt that the government might put their own lives on the block to save itself. Suddenly, for hundreds of thousands, the movement was their own business.”²⁷

Five months after Cinema Rex, the Shah departed Iran. The National Interest offered the honest counterfactual: “Perhaps, given time for more liberalizing reforms, Iran would have transitioned to a different form of government than the Islamic revolutionary state which currently holds power.” The fire did not cause the revolution — it accelerated it, radicalized it, and foreclosed the possibility of a gradual transition.²⁸

The building itself was destroyed during the Iran-Iraq War when Abadan was besieged. There are no dedicated state-sponsored memorials or major annual commemorations. The omission reflects causal discomfort. Forty-six years of missing footage, silenced newspapers, and executed witnesses. If this is what happened when 400 people burned in a cinema, what else was the revolution built on?

This article is part of 48 Hours. For the revolution’s near-death in summer 1978, see The Revolution That Nearly Failed. For the American policy failure, see Tell Brzezinski.

Man on the roof from eyewitness accounts compiled in post-revolutionary investigations and oral histories. ↩
The Deer background from Hamid Naficy’s cinema history and MoMA’s assessment; SAVAK censorship from Kimiai’s own accounts. ↩
US Embassy cable TEHRAN 08012, August 22, 1978; arson method from trial testimony and forensic analysis. ↩
Fire station proximity and hydrant failure from TIME magazine contemporary reporting; Ettela’at description from published account; burial details from Karim Nikunazar, Cinema Hell (2020). ↩
Death toll range from official records (377 minimum), Ministry of Justice court file (403), Spencer C. Tucker (422), and upper scholarly estimate (470). ↩
Perpetrator profiles from trial records and post-revolutionary investigations. ↩
Takbalizadeh’s arrest and trial testimony from court transcripts. ↩
Takbalizadeh’s radicalization testimony from trial records. ↩
Kiavash account from oral histories compiled in Abadan; social pressure dynamics from scholarly analysis. ↩
Previous cinema arsons from Abbas Amanat’s documentation; Salahshoor’s confession published in Iranian press. ↩
Mousavi Tabrizi’s confrontation from surviving trial footage. ↩
Khomeini’s August 22 statement from recorded declaration; cassette network distribution from Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). ↩
Khomeini’s contradictory statements on cinemas from his recorded speeches, compiled in scholarly analyses. ↩
Homayoun’s blame and police arrests from contemporary press and government records. ↩
Regime’s decision to withhold intelligence documented in multiple analytical accounts of the revolution. ↩
“Narrative asymmetry” formulation from analytical review of the Cinema Rex case. ↩
Circumstantial evidence compiled from multiple scholarly and journalistic investigations. ↩
Counter-evidence from post-revolutionary SAVAK archive review and trial analysis. ↩
Abbas Amanat, Michael Axworthy, Abbas Milani, Daniel Byman — scholarly consensus documented in their published works. ↩
Satrapi, Persepolis (Pantheon Books, 2003); scholarly criticism of its Cinema Rex depiction. ↩
Mousavi Tabrizi’s conflicts of interest from trial analysis and biographical records; Nouri Hamedani connection from multiple sources. ↩
Trial proceedings from surviving footage and court records; reframing of Takbalizadeh’s testimony documented in legal analysis. ↩
Families’ 2,000-kilometer journey and Takbalizadeh’s execution timing from oral histories and Nikunazar, Cinema Hell. ↩
Tehrani’s revelation from Nourizadeh’s journalism. ↩
Safaei Farahani’s statement from published interviews; Sobhe Emruz incident documented in press freedom records. ↩
Oil worker mobilization from industry records and scholarly analysis; Nouri Hamedani’s alleged strategic goal from multiple testimonies. ↩
Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (Pantheon Books, 1985). ↩
The National Interest counterfactual analysis. ↩