Isatis, a 2020 Iranian documentary directed by Alireza Dehghan, is not a film about Zoroastrianism. It is a film about the desert city of Yazd, organized around the four traditional elements, water, wind, soil and fire, and it is worth being honest about that scope before describing what it actually contains: a substantial, specifically named strand devoted to Yazd's living Zoroastrian community.
Under the film's account of water, it follows the builders who maintain the city's ancient qanat aqueducts. Under soil and wind, it turns to Yazd's adobe construction and its famous windcatcher towers, cooling architecture built centuries before mechanical air conditioning. Under fire, the film turns explicitly to the devotional life of Yazd's Zoroastrian community, tracing what its own promotional synopsis describes as the story of sacred fire carried from Zoroastrian religious masters into the city's modern factories, presenting that fire tradition as a living practice continuous with the present day rather than as a closed historical subject.
The film frames Yazd's Zoroastrians, Muslims and Jews together as evidence of a city that has practiced religious coexistence for a very long time, and it closes on a note of real concern: that industrial development and pollution now threaten a heritage the film spends its whole runtime documenting. It screened in the documentary section of the 38th Fajr International Film Festival, Iran's principal national film festival, in February 2020.