Born in Tehran in 1938, Bahram Beyzaie is a playwright, scholar, theatre director and film-maker, and a major scholar of Persian theatre and ritual. His cinema draws on Persian myth, history and folk performance. Downpour (1972) and The Stranger and the Fog (1974) were important early films of the Iranian New Wave. His masterpiece Bashu, the Little Stranger, made in 1986 and held back by the censors until 1989, is about a boy from the war-torn south who is taken in by a woman in the north, and has been called the best Iranian film of its time. He later taught in the United States.
Filmography
- Downpour (1972)
- The Stranger and the Fog (1974)
- Ballad of Tara (1979)
- Death of Yazdgerd (1982)
- Maybe Some Other Time (1988)
- Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989)
- Killing Mad Dogs (2001)