Experimental cinema is an exercise in, and experimentation with, the potentials of the media of cinema, and uses this process towards aesthetic goals along with reflection of individual and social concerns. This cinema challenges the rules and norms of mainstream cinema and expands the boundaries of audio-visual media and the modes of understanding motion pictures. The purpose of this article is to analyze the genres of Iranian experimental films that have typically won awards in the Tehran Short Film Festival in the period 2001-2016. The data were collected through observational and library procedures, and the descriptive-analytical method was used. The findings show that the genre approach to avant-garde and experimental cinema is a useful tool for analyzing the produced examples. Some components of the subgenres of the super-genres of expanded cinema, the American avant-garde, and the European avant-garde can be observed in the structure of the studied works. At the same time, examining the structure of some works indicates a hybrid or mixed state. The majority of these films exhibit some general, and sometimes minimal, features of experimental films. In other words, most of the works use the aesthetic components of some genres of experimental cinema in a limited way. Explication of the aesthetic principles of experimental cinema and its subgenres provides scholarly as well as operational solutions in theory and practice for researchers and filmmakers.