This article provides a cultural history of film production at Kanun-i Parvarish-i Fikry (Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), focusing primarily on its first decade. Several notable Iranian filmmakers, including Abbas Kiarostami, Amir Naderi, and Bahram Beyzaie, as well as animators such as Nourredin Zarrinkelk, worked for Kanun. The institute produced many important and influential works of Iranian cinema. An overview of Kanun’s founding, organization, and internal culture helps contextualize this output. Kanun’s films were both part of, and helped shape, the Iranian New Wave and postrevolutionary art house cinema. The article discusses how and why realist and modernist film modes flourished at Kanun and highlights specific films and filmmakers. It also situates these films within a history of Iranian sponsored and non-fiction film more broadly and defines Kanun’s position— simultaneously aligned and resistant—within the Pahlavi state’s modernization agenda of the 1960s and 1970s. The article includes brief analyses of short films such as Waiting (1974) and Orderly or Disorderly (1981) and argues that pre-revolutionary Iranian filmmakers used innovative formal strategies to make sense of emerging conditions of modernity.