Tahmineh Milani

Born in Tabriz, Milani is the ac­claimed director of such well-known woman-centered films as Two Women (1999), The Hidden Half (2001), The Fifth Reaction (2003), and The Unwanted Woman (2005). These films have been controversial in Iran, particularly The Hidden Half, which led to her imprisonment in 2001 for counterrevolutionary statements and alleged maligning and misrepresentation of the 1979 Iranian Revo­lution. The film tells the story of a young wife who reveals her past political association with a leftist group to her husband, a judge who is deciding the fate of a woman faced with execution for a similar crime. Milani’s related comments to the media about friends and colleagues from universities who had been dismissed, disappeared, or executed for “supporting factions waging war against God” angered the conservative Revolutionary Council, which demanded her execu­tion. Imprisoned, Milani was released a week later with President Mohammad Khatami’s personal guarantee to the Revolutionary Council of her good citizenship record.

Milani’s outspoken political comments are in keeping with her courageous stance on other social and cultural issues, specifically those impacting Iranian women. In The Fifth Reaction, Milani holds up for careful scrutiny the psychosocial effects of separating a mother from her children in case of widowhood in certain sectors of Iranian society. Niki Karimi plays Fereshteh, a young woman who loses her husband in an accident and is then told by her powerful father-in-law that she is no longer welcome in their house and that the children do not belong to her. Patriarchy’s collusion with economic and gender discrimination is powerfully analyzed in this film. Milani offers a way out for Iranian women caught in such helpless binds by surrounding Fereshteh with some gutsy women friends who help her kidnap her own children.

Dariush Mehrjui

Born in Tehran, Mehrjui developed an early interest in music, learning the piano and santur. He came to study cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), but abandoned it for a philosophy degree, reputedly disappointed by the UCLA film school’s Hollywood emphasis. After graduating in 1964, he started a literary magazine, which he saw not as a rejection of cinema but as the best way to combine his literary, painterly, musi­cal, and philosophical interests. Mahrjui’s first film upon his return to Iran was Diamond 33 (1967), a rehash of the James Bond subgenre, that was neither critically nor commercially successful. Mehrjui never returned to such action-dominated filmmaking, and his next film, The Cow (1969), scripted and based on a story by Gholamhos­sein Saedi, began his regular collaboration with important literary figures. A metaphoric critique of the Iranian government shot in stark black^-and-white, The Cow helped launch the Iranian New Wave and brought Mehrjui fame both domestically and on the International film festival circuit. In Mr. Naïve (1970), The Postman (1971), and The Cycle (1976), he continued to expose social problems through a poetic approach to cinema that could bypass official censorship.

Although he temporarily left the country following the 1979 Iranian Revolution—making A Journey to the Land of Rimbaud in France in 1984—Mehrjui has returned to make some of the most acclaimed postrevolutionary Iranian films. His comedy on the hous­ing situation in Tehran, The Tenants (1985), was highly successful at the box-office. Harpoon (1990) is a complex tale of intellectual alienation, interlaid with dream sequences and fantasies, as the eponymous protagonist struggles to balance Western objectivism and traditional beliefs. Banu (1992), Sara (1993), Pari (1994), and Leila (1996) are all films that center on the lives and struggles of bourgeois women, a clear shift from Mehrjui’s early focus on the poor. Leila, banned in Iran until Mohammad Khatami was elected president, is the story of a barren woman (Leila Hatami) who, despite her own feelings, allows—indeed encourages—her husband to take a second wife so that he might have a child. Including many close-ups and a shadowy bedroom scene, Leila pushed at the limits of Iranian censor ship; it also provoked vehement criticism for its portrayal of female villainy and passivity. Although the film utilizes numerous distanc­ing devices—notably direct address to the camera, sound distortion, missing frames, and brightly colored fades—the emotionally wrenching story remains paramount. Mehrjui has completed more than 20 features to date, sustaining one of Middle Eastern cinema’s most significant careers.

Abbas Kiarostami

At the end of the 1990s, an international poll of influential critics and curators named Abbas Kiarostami that decade’s most important filmmaker—no mean feat for a self-taught cineaste whose earliest movies were shorts made for Iran’s Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. But those films display breathtaking originality in their fresh, free-wheeling approach to storytelling and in their upfront, witty use of cinematic form, in which Kiarostami plays with sound, image, dramatic structure, and point of view to draw attention to the films’ status as manipulative artifice.

Only at the end of the 1980s did Kiarostami begin to garner the international acclaim he deserved. His award-winning Khane-ye doust kodjast? (1987) (Where Is the Friend’s Home?) was the turning point, but it was Nema-ye Nazdik (1990) (Close Up) and Zendegi va digar hich (1991) that displayed the full sophistication and complexity of Kiarostami’s methods. Not only was Kiarostami taking events from real life and turning them into urgent, poetic, emotionally affecting fables, he was also offering reflections on the nature of the films he was making in particular and on the cinematic medium in general.

Digital technology enabled greater experimentation. Ten (2002) is a moving, relevant, and richly resonant look at the plight of women in Iran. It was shot wholly within the confines of a car, using two digital cameras fixed to the dashboard, and pointed at the driver and her passengers. Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) was very experimental, consisting of five seemingly single-shot shorts filmed by the Caspian Sea. It is minimalist, metaphorical, and nearly abstract, but also witty, lyrical, and imbued—as is all of Kiarostami’s work—with a profound, contemplative love of life’s mysteries.