With Bahram Beizai's death, Iranian cinema is orphaned Submitted by Hamid Dabashi on Thu, 01/01/2026 - 02:15 The death of a towering Iranian filmmaker is the loss of an artist whose work carried his homeland's myths, language and memory despite years of exile and censorship Iranian filmmaker Bahram Beizai speaks after receiving two awards for his film 'The Dog Massacre' at the closing ceremony of the 19th Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran on 9 February 2001 (Behrouz Mehri/AFP) Off Bahram Beizai (1938-2025) has passed away . His unfolding will always be green. The pre-eminent Iranian filmmaker, playwright, literary scholar, and altogether a living legend among his people, Beizai spent the last 15 years of his life in voluntary exile in California. Like a fish out of water, whenever he said "here" in conversation, he still meant Tehran. Bahram Beizai is not a household name outside Iran, like Abbas Kiarostami, or now Asghar Farhadi or Jafar Panahi. He was a filmmaker's filmmaker - the Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasujiro Ozu of Iran all in one, if one needed a shorthand for audiences beyond his homeland. His entire oeuvre forms a formidable masterclass for his peers. A widely popular dramatist, a formidable filmmaker, an amateur literary scholar and an iconic figure in contemporary Iranian visual and performing arts, Beizai died quietly on 26 December, his 87th birthday. He died far from the homeland he dearly, passionately and grievously loved, sorely missed, and served through a lifetime of artistic devotion and with an unsurpassed sense of historical mission. With his death, Iranian cinema is suddenly orphaned after losing one of its last living institutions. Masters departing Just months ago, Iran lost another irreplaceable master, Nasser Taghvai . Before him, another towering figure, Dariush Mehrjui , was murdered on 14 October 2023, in what appears to have been an armed robbery. We lost Kiarostami prematurely to medical malpractice on 4 July 2016. Long before Beizai's passing in California, another pillar of Iranian cinema, Sohrab Shahid-Saless , died in Chicago on 2 July 1998, far from his homeland. Kiumars Pourahmad , another pioneer of Iranian cinema, took his own life in April 2023. Beizai was no ordinary filmmaker or dramatist. He was an institution unto himself Meanwhile, key artists such as Amir Naderi and Susan Taslimi have built their careers outside Iran, while Jafar Panahi, arguably Iran's most important working filmmaker today, tours the United States with his new film It Was Just an Accident (2025) under an active arrest warrant in his own country. Something seismic is happening in contemporary Iranian history - something far graver than can be captured by the deafening clamour of the region's nauseating politics. Beizai was no ordinary filmmaker or dramatist. He was an institution unto himself. I was born and raised in his cinema and theatre. As a provincial student in Tehran in the 1970s, like millions of others my age, I basked in his films and attended his plays religiously. It was there that I found my enduring aesthetic sensibilities. Take Beizai out of the monument of Iranian cinema and it collapses. A mythic cinema Beizai was perhaps the most literate of Iranian filmmakers for whom cinema was never enough, leading him to regularly return to theatre. He was one of the principal architects of contemporary Iranian theatre, creatively reconnecting classical techniques such as pardeh-dari and shabih-khani with a vertiginously original modern imagination. Who will remember Beizai outside Iran, and in what terms, and for whose posterity? In the face of that vanishing history, the psychopathology of Instagram, X and Facebook posts increasingly substitutes fleeting spectacle for any meaningful cultural legacy. The President’s Cake is our favourite movie of 2025. Here are 11 other standouts Read More » Beizai was a fiercely independent thinker who was always in trouble with censorial authorities both before and after the 1979 revolution . They feared nothing specific in his artwork except his independence and creativity of mind. His films were endlessly over-interpreted, at times reasonably and at others absurdly, regardless of whether the work itself warranted such readings. One could write, as I have on multiple occasions , an entire history of contemporary Iran landmarked through his films. With Uncle Moustache (1970), he announced a new cinematic vision. With Thunderstorm (1971) and Perhaps Some Other Time (1988), he showed how urban modernity could be infused with latent mythologies. In The Stranger and the Fog (1974), The Ballad of Tara (1979), and Death of Yazdegerd (1981), he exposed the archetypal forces animating Iranian history. With Bashu: The Little Stranger (1986), Travellers (1992), Killing Mad Dogs (2001), and When We Are Asleep (2009), he brought those mythologies to their fullest cinematic expression. All of his films are masterpieces, and the release of each one was an event in Iranian and world cinema. Beizai was a myth-maker, descending into the deep history of his culture and re-emerging with renewed readings of collective memory. And this, intuitively, is what frightened Iranian authorities - not anything particular he showed, but the mythic air of his artworks and the world they created. This is the subject of my most recent extensive study of his films. Cinema and exile Beizai was the subject of intense scrutiny and harassment in his homeland. He could not freely make films, stage plays, publish books or even teach at a university. His birth into a deeply learned Bahai family further complicated his relationship with the state, although he repeatedly insisted that his only religion was art. He made several attempts to leave Iran and build a productive life abroad, without success. During Mohammad Khatami's presidency (1997-2005), he experienced a brief reprieve, including the release of Killing Mad Dogs (2001), one of his masterpieces. He finally left Iran for the US with his family, whose well-being became paramount for him. His decision to leave Iran was primarily driven by concern for his family. The reactionary intellectual milieu he was forced to inhabit was no natural habitat for him. He saved his family, but sacrificed 15 years of his public standing and cultural influence. Exile proved inhospitable for an artist whose sublime command of Persian prose had lost its natural audience and linguistic world. He was a stranger in the English language. He never left Iran, nor did Iran ever leave him. A matchless master Legendary artists like Beizai are ultimately homeless. They do not live in Iran - Iran lives in them. They do not return to Iran - Iran returns to them. He was a stranger in his own homeland and out of place in Europe and the US, yet he was forever at home in his sublime art, where he built a citadel for himself and for the rest of us to dwell in the shadow of his wisdom and grace. He was a stranger in his own homeland and out of place in Europe and the US, yet he was forever at home in his sublime art Any decent country would now lower its flags to half-mast. A national period of mourning would be declared, and streets, squares and theatres would bear his name. A year-long retrospective of his films, plays and writings would commence. In the absence of that, he is left at the mercy of one inane social media post or another, through which his brilliance nevertheless still shines. None of that matters now. He has joined eternity - a history and a landscape. Like Mount Damavand. Like the Shahnameh. Like Hafez's poetry, Omar Khayyam's quatrains and Attar's allegories. Beizai was no ordinary filmmaker or playwright. He was his own creation. A man of mythic proportions, he was rooted in the most distant memories of his culture, definitive of a transhistorical landscape that runs from Zoroaster to Ferdowsi to Hafez to Beizai himself, a lineage whose mythic roots remain layered in the ground and sustain it against all odds. There is a pivotal scene in Bashu: The Little Stranger in which Na'i, the mother figure, decides to adopt the displaced child she has been caring for. Dictating a letter to her absent husband, she instructs her son to write: "Like all other children, he is the offspring of the sun and the earth." That was Beizai himself. That is Beizai himself: the offspring of the sun that shines over the earth of his homeland. Rest in glory, Master Bahram Beizai. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Film Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0