In 1997, Abbas Kiarostami’s masterful Taste of Cherry outraged Iranian censors because of its frank and sympathetic depiction of a man contemplating suicide, one of the most abhorrent sins in Islam and a taboo topic in a theocratic Muslim society. In this year’s "Festival of Films from Iran" at the Museum of Fine Arts, suicide has become high concept; it figures prominently in several of the 17 features in the program.

Neither is that only transgressive subject up for discussion — these films focus unabashedly on teenage pregnancy, abortion, adultery, AIDS, drug addiction, debauchery, destitution, social injustice, women’s rights, and terrorism. As the themes of Iranian cinema have grown more ambitious, so too have the forms; the genres here include melodrama, supernatural fantasy, and black comedy. Long one of the most vibrant national cinemas in the world, Iranian films have advanced beyond their neo-realistic origins. They’re no longer just about following a kid around town with an Arriflex.

As for suicide, Massoud Jaffari-Jozani’s Coming of Age (2000; November 23 at 4 p.m., with the actor Ramyar Rossoukh present) opens with one. Poor Naser (Rossoukh), a young physician, can’t sleep without nightmares of when his friend drowned himself while he looked on helplessly, unable to swim. So Naser throws himself into his work at a local youth clinic helping teens adjust to the peculiar rigors of Tehran society. The clinic is a bit of a microcosm of contemporary Iranian woes — patriarchal oppression, Western materialism versus Islamic spiritualism, freedom versus conformity — and Naser, like almost every other character in these films, is tempted to emigrate. But a vulnerable youngster compels his attention, and things get melodramatic, though the film remains an engrossing combination of cinéma-vérité, Boston Public, and Rebel Without a Cause.

Troubled teens, teenage girls in particular, have almost become their own genre in Iranian film. Nasser Refaie’s The Exam (2002; November 15 at 6:15 p.m.) starts with a closed gate on an empty street and opens to a courtyard of young girls in identical black robes milling about waiting to gain entrance to the national university examination. They range from the coltish cliques sneaking smokes and staring at boys (a group of ’50s-like rockers dispersed by an enraged father) to a young mom waiting for her husband to take the baby so she can take the test to a young wife terrorized by her husband, who refused her permission to take it. Refaie shot in real time, and his camera fluidly drifts through the crowd, dropping one thread of narrative and picking up the next. But though his film is always surprising and fascinating (where did the monkey come from?), it’s also superficial and obscure (that’s due in part to the washed-out subtitles, a constant problem in this series).

The discontents of the kids in The Exam pale before the brutal oppression endured by the spunky, bright, doomed trio of village girls in veteran director Dariush Mehrjui’s Bemani/Stay Alive (2002; November 15 at 8 p.m.). One by one each aspires for something beyond the stunted life of a woman under a despotic provincial patriarchy; one by one each pays the price. A beautiful carpet weaver flirts with a soldier and is beheaded by her brothers; a medical student is locked in the basement by her father, who disapproves of her studies. Most affecting is the title character; her father marries her to their crapulous landlord to pay the rent. The husband beats her like a dog until her only recourse seems, yes, suicide. Mehrjui is a cogent muckraker with a surprising knack for the subtle and wryly ironic touch — the curmudgeonly husband, for example, has installed a car alarm on the refrigerator.

Back in the city, things aren’t much better for the younger generation, though Dr. Naser might have been encouraged by the spunky teen in Rassul Sadr-Ameli’s I’m Taraneh, 15 (2002; November 1 at 8 p.m.). Taraneh (Taraneh Alidoosti) announces her name and age in the film’s first scene as she passes security to visit her widowed father in prison. She’s cheerful and confident despite being on her own and stalked at her job by local playboy Amir.

She may be self-reliant, but she’s still only 15. She succumbs to Amir’s pressure and that of his termagant mother and marries him. Soon she finds herself married, divorced, pregnant, and alone. Sadr-Ameli believes in the film’s heroine — she’s never a victim. And the villainess — the wicked mother-in-law, who’s the head of the local women’s-rights organization — is a compelling fusion of hypocrisy, desperation, and practicality.

It’s not just the young and poor who suffer in Iran — the old and privileged have their problems too, especially if they’re a corrupt, hard-drinking, lecherous gynecologist like the one in Bahman Farmanara’s A House Built on Water (2002; November 8 at 7:30 p.m., with director Farmanara present). Things start out badly for Dr. Reza Sepidbakht before the opening credits have rolled as, driving drunk, and with a floozy in tow, he runs over an angel with his Mercedes. The flattened little cherub grabs Dr. Reza’s hand and burns it with a wound that won’t heal — talk about being touched by an angel.

Other ominous developments follow. A little miracle boy who memorized the Koran has fallen into a coma and is being treated at Reza’s hospital; Reza’s estranged dad has been walking around naked at the rest home; Reza’s son has returned home from the US a drug addict; and someone (the suspects are many; every woman looks at Reza with the bitterness of past experience) has been following him. That it all ties together seems inevitable once you note the recurring image of an old woman in white who knits multicolored balls of yarn. The dénouement of this extraordinary exercise in soap opera, fantasy, existentialism, and cultural conflict proves profoundly moving.

Another professional faces a spiritual crisis in Kiomars Pourahmed’s The Longest Night (2001; November 22 at 6 p.m.). A long night indeed: Hamed has just driven his wife and child to the airport, where she will take a flight to Germany and ask for political asylum. We spend the next year locked up with Hamed in his apartment as he tortures himself over why she left. Is it Iranian society, or is it him? And what about the helpful Iranian guy in Sweden? Hamed himself is unemployed because he would not toe the religious line; like A House Built on Water, The Longest Night peers into the void left when the tyranny of state religion gives way to free thought. Although Night comes close to causing cabin fever, the bittersweet romantic coda makes this vigil well worthwhile.

Maybe what Hamed needed to put his personal woes in perspective was a trip to Alireza Raisian’s The Deserted Station (2002; November 9 at 4 p.m.). En route to a desert shrine to pray for a successful pregnancy, an ex-schoolteacher (the beautiful Leila Hatami) and her photographer husband are waylaid by an accident and forced to stay in an isolated village. While her husband travels with the local schoolteacher to get a part for the car, the wife takes the teacher’s place at the school. As she gets to know the oddball urchins and other roughhewn locals, she drifts off into a mystical journey of her own. Based on a story written by Abbas Kiarostami, The Deserted Station also evokes Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, especially in its mood of nascent revelation, beginning with the stray deer that causes the accident and culminating in a sequence in which the wife plays a game of hide-and-seek with the children in a vast yard of derelict train cars.

And perhaps Dr. Reza might have benefitted from Farhad Mehranfar’s The Legend of Love (2000; November 8 at 5:45 p.m.), a poetic if sometimes overwrought tale of a woman doctor who journeys to Kurdistan to track down her fiancé, who’s there helping the Kurdish rebels. Legend avoids putting the conflict in a political context by couching it in mythic terms. A minstrel and a dervish guide the woman in her search; along the way they sing a Kurdish song about a hero, his bride, and a quest for a white flower, a tale that’s illustrated in lush fantasy sequences. From time to time the image of the fiancé will drop by for a dispiriting chat, or to offer a view of the bloody hostilities he’s experienced. With its rapturous cinematography of mountainous vistas and frenzied tribal rites, Legend recalls the ethnographic rhapsodies of Georgian director Sergei Paradjanov.

If being too smart is no guarantee of happiness in Iran, neither is being too dumb. Hamid Jebelli’s White Dream (2002; November 16 at 5 p.m.) is an Iranian Rain Man or I Am Sam, though mostly without the mawkishness. Mentally handicapped but meticulous and sweet-natured, the middle-aged Reza works as an errand boy at a wedding-dress shop. Always delivering the bride’s dresses but never getting the bride, he consoles himself by talking to his mother’s grave, all the while overlooking the glad eye given him by one of the shop’s seamstresses. When he falls for a rich, beautiful customer, the light comedy turns sinister, absurd, and heartbreaking.

That’s the thing about Iranian comedies: there isn’t a Three Amigos among them. The jokes end up with some dark and dubious punch lines. In an airport terminal in the desolate Iranian province of Amadan, a desperate man looks up at a TV screen, where he sees the World Trade Center in flames. Say what you will about the propriety of using such an image, it’s a bold way to begin a black comedy about airline hijacking.

Unlike the middle-class malcontents of The Deserted Station and The Legend of Love, who slum in the sticks for spiritual succor, the poor and oppressed in Ebrahim Hatamikia’s Low Heights (2002; November 29 at 7:45 p.m.) are trapped there and trying to get the hell out. To do so, Ghassem, the desperado mentioned above, decides to bring his extended family along in a scheme that combines Dog Day Afternoon with National Lampoon’s Vacation. Far from being an ill-conceived farrago of low comedy and tragic current events, the film ascends to heights of audacity, inventiveness, and insight no Hollywood filmmaker would aspire to.