Mehrjui's next picture, Dayereh Mina (The Cycle, 1976), evokes the plight of the poor in Iranian society. The film is set in Tehran, the national center of government, wealth, corruption, and human misery. Ali, an innocent youth in his late teens, comes to the city with his dying father in search of medical care -a hopeless mission because they have no money to pay for treatment. As they mill around the hospital gate with others like themselves, an ambulance driver directs Ali to the local blood bank where he can sell his blood, where addicts, alcoholics, and invalids are rounded up and literary drained of their life blood to supply the hospitals (and those who can afford them).

Faced with the prospect of joining the miserable ranks of the exploited, Ali opts to become and exploiter instead. Attaching himself to Sameri, the director of the blood bank, he is soon helping to round up victims and to deliver their more or less infected blood to the hospital (where he also steals rice that can be sold to the poor on the streets). When one principled doctor tries to set up a legitimate blood bank, Ali works with Sameri to block his efforts. Caught up in this cycle of corruption, he cannot spare the time to care for his dying father, and misses his funeral because he is busy siphoning blood out of a couple of derelicts. When he finally arrives at the cemetery on his motorbike, the ambulance driver confronts him, but it is clear form the final freeze frame of Ali in his sunglasses and new leather jacket that the cycle will continue.

 The title Dayereh Mina -literally "cycle of the universe"- is taken from a verse by Hafiz, a famous mystical poet of the fourteenth century: "Because of the cycle of the universe, my heart is bleeding." According to Mehrjui, "I didn't choose this tile to signify the whole of the film, but to underscore the relationship that develops among these characters around that 'other,' which is the blood of one human being going into another."

 The original idea for the film came from a doctor friend who encouraged Mehrjui to look into the illicit blood traffic. "My first experience was so horrendous, and I was so affected by it," the director says, "that I immediately wanted to do something about it, and that something became the film." He once again collaborated with Gholam-Hossein Saedi on the script; Saedi, who was then operating a clinic in the Tehran slums with his brother, had already written a short story on the subject, and this provided the core of the plot. While the cast included some well known actors, among them Ezzatollah Entezami as Sameri and the popular star Fourouzan as a nurse who befriends Ali and becomes sexually involved with him, both Ali and his father were played by non-professionals, and the crowds of blood donors shown throughout the film were recruited form the even larger army of real donors in Tehran.

Under Iran's censorship laws, the script was subject to approval before filming could begin. In fact, the Pahlavi government favored the project as a means of combating a major health problem, and the film was coproduced by the Ministry of Culture. Opposition form some members of the medical community delayed production nonetheless, and the film was not completed until 1974. Around that time Mehrjui helped to found the New Cinema Group, a production cooperative that was formed after its members had resigned from the Iranian Film Artists Syndicate in protest against the increasing commercialism of the film industry. Funding from the New Cinema Group enabled Mehrjui to complete The Cycle , and the film was immediately advertised as one of their first two productions, but at the point it was held up again by the medical lobby. As Mehrjui later explained, the issue was not simply his film, but a pervasive climate of censorship and repression. "For three years," he told interviewers in 1977, "I haven't done anything. It's only now that they let me make a television documentary." During the same period, Saedi was imprisoned again and tortured.

 The Cycle was finally released in 1977, after pressure from the Carter administration in the United States had prompted a limited restoration of human rights and intellectual freedom in Iran. Even then the film could not be shown there for some time because the market was glutted with foreign films -in 1977 domestic production reached an all-time low of less than a dozen features. As a result, The Cycle premiered in Europe, where it was immediately acclaimed. It received a grand prize from the journalists of Antenne 2 at the Paris film festival and the International Critics Award at Berlin.

Mehrjui said of the film that he had set to show "a human society of vultures, dedicating themselves eagerly and committedly to engulfing the lives of others. I wanted to reveal this drama in all its absurdity and painfulness." The European reviewers agreed that he had succeeded. David Robinson wrote that "the sense of horror in enhanced by the film's detachment and ironic, throwaway quality... Pointedly observed, sharply constructed and admirably played, this is the best film to emerge form Iran for several years." Derek Malcolm agreed, knowing that "its bitter social comment, its compassion for the poor of Tehran and, above all, its superb images of city lowlife..give it a quite exceptional veracity." John Coleman added that it was "Compellingly photographed by Houshang Baharlou, with a marvelous use of skyline, early morning light, etched colour."

 The film was no less admired in France. Francoise Aude compared it with Bunuel's Los Olvidados (1950) and Pasolini's Accatone (1961) as a study of the corruption of youth. Jacqueline Lajeunesse praised the framing, the camera movement, the rapid editing, and the excellent interplay of the actors, as well as the masterful settings, choice of incidents, and script; for her, "this desperate film, this uncompromising indictment, is one of the finest works that has ever been made."

 By the time The Cycle reached the United States in early 1979, the sense of outrage it expressed had been borne out by the Iranian Revolutio- the film opened at the Public Theater in New York City on the day after militia loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini took final control of the country. As Vincent Canby observed in the New York Times, The Cycle "would be an interesting film under any circumstances, but to realize that it was produced when and where it was adds an extraordinary measure of interest." At the end of his favorable review, Canby came back to political developments to raise a prophetic question: I have a suspicion -based on this one film- that Mr. Mehrjui's highly developed social conscience is not going to be especially pleased in the religious state that Iran's new rulers are likely to se up. What will happen to him?"

 In the fist months after the Revolution, what happened, in fact, was that the censorship of the Pahlavi era was lifted an cultural activity of all kinds flourished. It was reported, for example, that Ayatollah Khomeini saw Gav on television and found it "very instructive," with the result that prints were made for national distribution. But with the institutionalization of the Islamic Republic, the Khomeini government imposed its own censorship of scripts and films according to an Islamic code requiring, among other things, the presence of a government official throughout filming.

Although Mehrjui had been working before the revolution, on an allegorical film set in a desert village, he wound up making a very different kind of picture under the sponsorship of the Institute for the intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. This was Hayate Poshti (The Backyard, 1980), a didactic story about hig-school students who band together to confront the principal over his abuse of authority.

 In his review of Iranian cinema for the 1982 International Film Guide, the filmmaker and administrator Hagir Dariush was quite critical about The Backyard: "Mehrjui is by now an almost unequalled expert in the art of obtaining government funds for his work, whatever the government. But while he could, in the former regime, afford the luxury of spending the government's money and passing at the same time as an opposition cineaste, he has now had to pay a price for his work with the new regime: indeed, while the director is understandably fond of believing in the 'anti-despotism' of his latest opus, his clergy-sustained sponsors have made absolutely certain that the film's symbolic zigzags and allusions could only aim at the already powerless president of the republic (Abolhasan Banisadr, who was soon after deposed) and at 'the liberals.'"

 The following year, presumably unwilling to go on working under these conditions, Mehrjui left with his wife and child and joined the large community of Iranian exiles in Paris. In 1985 Mehrjui returned with his family to Iran and is now working under the Islamic Republic. Here is a list of the movies that Mehrjui has completed after the revolution:
 
  The School We Went To. 1989 (Altered version of "The
  Backyard" 1981) The Tenants (1987) Shirak (1989) Hamoon (1990) Banoo (1992) Sara (1993) Pari (1994) Leila (1996) The Pear Tree (1998)