This article examines Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s City Trilogy—Nargess (1992), The May Lady (1998), and Under the Skin of the City (2001)—to explore how she employs innovative filmmaking techniques to navigate and challenge the constraints imposed on female subjectivity by post-revolutionary censorship codes. Through a nuanced interplay of narrative structure, editing techniques, and documentary realism, Bani-Etemad critiques the mechanisms of censorship that shape the representation of women in Iranian cinema.

A focal point of this analysis is The May Lady, where the protagonist, Forough Kia—a middle-class single mother and documentarian—functions as both a character and a metacinematic device, allowing Bani-Etemad to transcend conventional narrative frameworks and interrogate the social construction of womanhood. Forough’s documentary project on the “ideal Iranian mother” serves as a conduit for intertextual engagement with the other films in the trilogy, weaving together the experiences of working-class women who resist societal expectations. By integrating documentary elements and social realism, Bani-Etemad not only subverts dominant cultural myths but also reclaims cinematic space for the authentic portrayal of Iranian women’s struggles. Ultimately, this article argues that Bani-Etemad’s City Trilogy exposes the inherent tensions between state censorship and female agency, offering a powerful cinematic discourse on the intersection of gender, class, and sociopolitical constraints in contemporary Iran.