Contemporary Iranian cinema is a vital medium for narrating the political traumas and histories of displacement that define much of the 21st-century Middle East. Films such as Baran (2001) by Majid Majidi and Turtles Can Fly (2004), A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) by Bahman Ghobadi, and The Blackboard (2001) by Samira Makhmalbaf portray refugees and stateless peoples, especially Afghan and Kurdish communities, who are caught between borders and precarious survival. These characters traverse mined mountains, snow-covered terrain, and muddy crossings, thus forming intimate relationships with harsh natural landscapes as they search for food, shelter, and safety. While read through political lenses, this article offers an ecocritical perspective, exploring how nature itself becomes a central narrative force and agency in these films. The physical environment is not simply a backdrop but a living, affective presence that both enables and resists survival. In the absence of legal citizenship, the characters form a kind of ecological belonging through which they are dispossessed in human political systems but grounded in their relationship to land, weather, and geography. Nature shelters, witnesses, and sometimes punishes their movement, becoming a space of both refuge and struggle. By closely analyzing key scenes, landscape shots, soundscapes, and movement through space, this article argues that Iranian cinema foregrounds an “ecology of statelessness” where bare life is sustained not by state institutions but by precarious and resilient ties to the natural world. In doing so, these films raise urgent questions about what it means to belong politically, legally, and ecologically when citizenship is dispossessed. Finally, this article offers an ecocritical reading informed by Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of nature as a political actor, proposing a reconfiguration of the “collective” in which humans, nonhumans, and natural environments are entangled within shared vulnerabilities. This ecocritical reading thus expands the discourse on Iranian cinema by illuminating the entangled relationship between nature, mobility, and political dispossession.