Mohammad Ali Fardin

A former wrestling champion, Fardin was the biggest star in Iran’s cinema during the 1960s and early 1970s. He acted and sometimes directed films in the luti genre, playing the proletarian rogue with the heart of gold, who rejects Westernization and materialism yet does not challenge the status quo (Champion of Champions [Siamak Yasami, 1965]; The Treasures of Gharun [Yasami, 1965]). He made only one film after the Iranian Revolution of 1979: The Damned (Iraj Qaderi, 1982), an attempt to update the luti character in the newly installed Islamic Republic and in the context of the war with Iraq. Banned from further film acting along with many other prerevolutionary actors, Fardin nevertheless stayed in Iran, where the “King of Hearts,” as he was affectionately known after his 1968 film of that name, remained popular; his funeral in central Tehran attracted a crowd estimated at 20,000.

Niki Karimi

Karimi is an award-winning Iranian ac­tress, film director, and translator. Dariush Mehrjui’s Sara, based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, gave Karimi her first nationally and internationally acclaimed role, an emotionally charged rendering of the title character, Sara, a woman on the verge of discovering the truth about her exploitative and loveless marriage. She is best known, however, for her work with Iranian director Tahmineh Milani (Two Women, The Hidden Half, and The Fifth Reaction), in which Karimi portrays, with a complex vulnerability, the challenges facing modern Iranian women caught on the cusp of religious and secular identities. Karimi, fluent in Persian, French, and English, translated Marlon Brando’s biography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, into Farsi and made her directorial debut in 2001 with To Have or Not to Have, a documentary about infertility produced by Abbas Kiarostami. Karimi’s feature film directorial debut, One Night (2005), was nominated in the “Un Certain Regard” category at the Cannes Film Festival.

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.