On the Occasion of Iran’s National Cinema Day
Iran’s National Cinema Day offers us an opportunity to look again at the long road Iranian cinema has traveled—a road filled with rises and falls, brilliant periods and difficult years, failures and achievements, hopes and disappointments. Yet when we look back at this history, one essential part of it has sometimes received less attention than it deserves: the presence of women actors and the role they have played in shaping the identity of Iranian cinema.
The history of Iranian cinema cannot be written solely through the names of its great directors, its memorable films, or its male stars. If women are removed from this history, an enormous part of our cinematic memory disappears with them. It is almost impossible to imagine Dokhtar Lor without Roohangiz Saminejad, Bashu, the Little Stranger without Sousan Taslimi, Mother without Farimah Farjami, Under the Skin of the City without Golab Adineh, Leila without Leila Hatami, or countless important films of recent decades without the women who gave their characters life.
During the more than half a century that I have followed cinema, I have repeatedly witnessed changes in the way Iranian cinema looks at women. These changes have never been smooth or consistent. At times we have moved several steps forward, only to retreat again. But one thing cannot be denied: after an extraordinarily difficult and exceptional beginning, the woman actor gradually became one of the central pillars of Iranian cinema.
The story begins with Dokhtar Lor ( The Lur Girl) in 1933, when Roohangiz Saminejad stepped before the camera to play Golnar in what is generally recognized as the first Persian-language sound feature. Even those who made the film could hardly have imagined how historically significant her appearance would become. Today, when a young woman begins an acting career and stands before a movie camera, there is nothing unusual about it. Nearly a century ago, however, such an act was far from ordinary. Saminejad paid a personal price for being a pioneer, and the fame that followed Dokhtar Lor did not make her later life easy.
But the door had been opened. During the following decades, as an Iranian film industry gradually took shape, the number of women appearing in films increased. Commercial cinema needed women, and audiences became accustomed to seeing them on screen. Even so, in many films of those years, female characters had little independence. They were often presented as the mother, sister, wife, or lover of the male protagonist. Their presence was needed to advance his story, but they were rarely given the opportunity to become fully independent characters.
This, of course, was not unique to Iranian cinema. For many years, women throughout much of world cinema occupied similar positions. Iran, however, had its own particular cultural circumstances, and a woman’s entry into professional acting followed a more complicated path than it did in many other countries.
One important development was the arrival in cinema of women who had already worked extensively in the theater—actors such as Shahla Riahi, Fakhri Khorvash, and Jamileh Sheikhi. Their stage experience brought with it control of voice and movement, an understanding of dramatic space, and, most importantly, a greater ability to understand and construct the characters they played.
Shahla Riahi went a step further. In 1956 she directed Marjan, generally recognized as the first Iranian feature film directed by a woman. This happened at a time when even the presence of women as actors was not yet universally accepted, which makes her achievement historically far more significant than it may appear today.
For me, Fakhri Khorvash has always been one of the important examples of an actress who moved beyond the conventional image of women in Iranian commercial cinema. There was dignity and strength in both her appearance and her acting that prevented her characters from becoming mere extensions of the men around them. When we later see her in films such as Prince Ehtejab or Chess of the Wind, we encounter a woman whose presence changes the dramatic weight of the film itself.
The 1960s were also the age of stars. Iranian cinema was becoming a larger industry, movie theaters were crowded, audiences developed strong emotional relationships with their favorite actors, and a star’s name could play a decisive role in a film’s commercial success. Women occupied an important place within this star system, and Forouzan became one of the most famous figures of the period. Her enormous popularity, particularly following Ganj-e Qarun in 1965, demonstrated that a woman could attract audiences just as powerfully as a male star.
Yet there was a significant contradiction within this very success. Some women became enormously famous, but often at the price of repeatedly playing stereotypical characters—weak women whose lives remained dependent on men. Commercial cinema frequently placed women within a limited group of familiar types: the self-sacrificing woman, the victim, the lover, or the woman defeated by fate.
Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, this situation gradually began to change with the emergence of a new current in Iranian filmmaking. The Iranian New Wave did not merely alter the language of filmmaking; it changed the way filmmakers looked at human beings. Once directors began engaging more seriously with literature, society, psychology, and the complexities of human behavior, it became increasingly difficult to construct female characters according to the old formulas.
A woman now needed a past of her own, desires of her own, fears, love, anger, and contradictions. In this new atmosphere, actresses were given the opportunity to reveal themselves as artists.
For me, one of the greatest examples of this transformation is Sousan Taslimi. It is almost impossible to discuss women’s acting in Iranian cinema without devoting serious attention to Taslimi, because in Bahram Beyzaie’s films she reached a level of performance comparable to the finest actors anywhere in world cinema. Look again at Ballad of Tara, Death of Yazdgerd, and above all Bashu, the Little Stranger: Taslimi’s presence adds another dimension to the expressive power of Beyzaie’s cinema.
Naii in Bashu, the Little Stranger is one of the most completely realized women in the history of Iranian film. She does not wait for someone else to make decisions for her. She works, raises her children, manages the farm, protects a strange child who has suddenly entered her life, resists the objections of those around her, and ultimately acts according to her own judgment.
What matters is that her strength is never created through slogans. We see it in her behavior. Taslimi does not exaggerate the character’s strength; Naii’s power comes from within, and that is precisely what has made her unforgettable.
Beyzaie, in fact, is one of those filmmakers for whom women have almost always occupied a serious position. A woman in his cinema is not simply a witness to events. She decides, resists, questions, and at times understands what is happening more clearly than the men around her. Such a vision naturally created extraordinary opportunities for women actors.
Farimah Farjami represents another important chapter in the history of women’s acting in Iranian cinema. What always fascinated me about her work was the combination of vulnerability and strength. Her face could simultaneously contain fear, pride, exhaustion, hope, and anxiety. For that reason, her characters were often revealed not simply through dialogue but through the emotions she allowed us to see and feel.
Farjami belonged to a generation that helped move screen acting away from the overt demonstration of emotion and toward finer details. At times, one of her looks could express more than an entire scene filled with dialogue. In Mother, Lead, or The Last Act, her performance cannot be separated from the identity of the film itself.
Then came another generation of actresses who brought Iranian cinema into a new phase, and Fatemeh Motamed-Arya is one of its most important figures. I regard Motamed-Arya as one of those performers whose presence gives a film a certain sense of assurance—not because every film she has appeared in is necessarily successful, but because she takes the person she is playing seriously.
Perhaps her greatest gift is her ability to turn an ordinary woman into a cinematic character. The woman does not need to be extraordinary. She can be a mother, she can work, become angry, laugh, make mistakes, lose hope, and then somehow continue. This natural quality has always been one of the greatest strengths of Motamed-Arya’s acting.
In a different way, the same can be said of Golab Adineh. Her performance in Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City is difficult to forget because the mother she plays is never reduced to a simple symbol of a social class. She is a human being with humor, worries, hopes, and a fear of failure.
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad played a major role in expanding this kind of female character in Iranian cinema. In her films, women are no longer necessarily living at the edges of men’s stories. In works such as Nargess, The May Lady, Under the Skin of the City, and Gilaneh, women stand at the center of the film’s life. This was a significant transformation because when a character is written with greater depth, an actor has a much greater opportunity to create a real human being.
The 1990s were decisive in this respect. With The Bride, Niki Karimi became one of the central figures in a new era of stardom in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, and suddenly Iranian films once again had a highly popular young female star.
What was important about Karimi, however, was that she did not remain within that role. She soon moved toward more challenging performances. Her collaboration with directors such as Dariush Mehrjui demonstrated that popularity and serious acting did not have to contradict one another, and Sara remains one of the clearest examples of this. Her later move into directing also demonstrated that women in Iranian cinema were no longer prepared to see their place as being limited to the front of the camera.
Leila Hatami represents another stage in the maturation of women’s acting in Iranian cinema. There is something in her work that I have always regarded as one of the essential qualities of modern screen acting: trust in silence.
She does not need to constantly display what her character is feeling. Sometimes a look, a pause, or the particular way she speaks a simple sentence tells us everything happening inside the character. In Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila, this quality reaches its fullest expression. The film proceeds almost entirely through the emotional experience of its female protagonist. Had Hatami’s performance been even slightly more exaggerated, much of the film’s delicacy would have disappeared.
Years later, in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, we see a more mature form of this same approach. Simin is neither wholly right nor wholly wrong. She has the right to choose, and she may also make mistakes. It is precisely this complexity that forces an actor to create a human being rather than perform a stereotype.
Hedieh Tehrani brought yet another kind of woman to Iranian cinema during the 1990s. Her cool, controlled, and independent screen presence differed sharply from many previous models. Her characters were not constantly explaining their feelings, they were not always waiting to be rescued, and they did not necessarily try to make themselves lovable to the audience. At the time, this felt genuinely new, and it inevitably influenced the image of women in mainstream Iranian cinema.
Among the following generation, Taraneh Alidoosti was an actress who, from the beginning of her career, gravitated toward independent female characters. I’m Taraneh, 15 is an excellent example. It shows a teenage girl suddenly confronted with an enormous responsibility, yet without transforming her into an artificial heroine. Her strength emerges from resistance and endurance rather than melodramatic heroism.
Alidoosti’s later collaborations with Asghar Farhadi—from Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly to The Salesman—provided her with increasingly complex roles.
Farhadi is one of those filmmakers for whom women are crucial to the dramatic structure of the film. The women in his works do not stand at the margins of life. Each has her own perspective, reasoning, and relationship with the world around her.
In later years, actresses such as Baran Kosari, Merila Zarei, Negar Javaherian, Sareh Bayat, Parinaz Izadyar, and many others brought still greater diversity to women’s acting in Iranian cinema. Today it is no longer possible to speak of a single kind of “Iranian actress.”
Just as women in society do not all have one face or one voice, women actors in Iranian cinema follow very different paths. One may excel in comedy, another in social drama, another in historical roles, and another in experimental cinema. This diversity may itself be one of the clearest signs of Iranian cinema’s maturity.
When discussing the history of women actors in Iran, we should not forget the role of women filmmakers either. From Shahla Riahi in the distant past to Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Pouran Derakhshandeh, Tahmineh Milani, and later generations, the growing presence of women behind the camera allowed female experience to enter cinema more directly.
Naturally, when a woman filmmaker looks at the lives of women, she may notice details that a filmmaker with a different life experience might overlook. Yet ultimately, the quality of the filmmaker’s vision matters more than gender. Bahram Beyzaie is a man, and he created Naii, one of the most powerful women in Iranian cinema. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is a woman, and she has brought some of Iranian cinema’s most believable women to the screen. What finally matters is the degree to which a filmmaker sees a female character as a complete human being.
Throughout these years, the language of acting itself has also changed. Actors of earlier generations often came from theater, radio, or dubbing, where voice, diction, and movement played a much larger role. As the camera moved closer to the human face and the language of cinema changed, performances became quieter and more internal.
Today the camera records the smallest movement of the face, and an actor who displays emotion too forcefully can quickly appear unnatural. Part of the achievement of younger generations of women actors lies precisely in this control and their ability to use minute details.
But the issue is not simply the style of acting. More important is the transformation of the female character herself. If we look back across nearly a century of Iranian cinema, we can see that the woman on screen has moved from simply having a “presence” in a film toward becoming a fully realized human character.
At the beginning, the very fact that a woman could stand in front of a movie camera was an event. Then the question became whether a woman could become a star. Eventually, a much more important set of questions emerged: Who is this woman? What does she want? What does she fear? What decisions does she make? What mistakes does she make? What does she resist, and what does she love?
These are the questions that create a cinematic character.
Of course, Iranian cinema still contains many weak and stereotypical female characters, and there are films in which the woman could be removed from the story without fundamentally changing the dramatic structure. This problem is not exclusive to Iranian cinema; it exists throughout world cinema.
The difference between today and several decades ago is that alongside such films, we now have many others that simply could not be imagined without their female characters.
Iran’s National Cinema Day is a day to remember all the people who have built this cinema—from directors, cinematographers, editors, and writers to actors. Among them, women actors have played an enormous role.
If we wish to write the real history of Iranian cinema, we must remember that this history cannot be reduced to statistics, numbers of films, awards, festivals, or box-office receipts. It exists above all in the memory of the audience—in a look, a face, a pause, and that extraordinary moment when an actor moves so completely into a character that we no longer see the performer at all. We simply believe in the human being standing before us.
Nearly a century separates Roohangiz Saminejad from the youngest woman who today stands before an Iranian movie camera for the first time. Yet between these two points runs an unbroken line: the line of women who dared to be seen, to act, to experiment, to fail, to succeed, and ultimately to change the image of Iranian women on the screen.
That image has never been perfect. At times it has been realistic, at times idealized, at times stereotypical, and at times far removed from life itself. But as Iranian cinema has matured, women have increasingly moved toward the heart of its films and become more essential to its understanding of human life.
Happy National Cinema Day to all the women of Iranian cinema.
