Bahram Beyzai (Director)

Born: Tehran, 1938.



His output is not limited to cinema. He is a major scholar of Iranian performing arts, and has taught and written on the topic.  He is completely at home in classical Persian prose and poetry, painting, music, intellectual history, and philosophical discourse. But he is also equally at home with world cinema. He has written an authoritative book on Chinese theatre. He has directed and written plays, including the very influential 'Four Boxes' (1967), an allegory about oppression.
He is one of the most learned masters of Taziyeh, the Persian passion play.
His first film was a short, made for the Kanun in 1969. In the 1970s he began to emerge as a significant figure in Iranian cinema.
Once the Islamic Republic came to be, Beyzai was among those censored and harassed by its regime.
In the 1990s he made only one film, as his decision to stay in Iran meant he had little opportunity to work. His films also received comparatively little attention from the global cinema community, in part due to their complex nature rooted in the semiotics of Persian mythology, and also in part due to the 'NIC' of the likes of Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf coming to define Iranian cinema internationally while other filmmakers were not given the same amount of scrutiny.

• Dabashi calls his style a form of 'mythic realism', deeply embedded in the symbolism of Persian culture. He wrote of the director: "Beizai is a filmmaker whose cinema, more than anyone else's, is rooted in the deepest layers of Iran's cultural memories, all the way back to its inaugural mythic imaginings"
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• Beizai once said, "You see, my duty is to show you things that you have not experienced yet and that are not tangible to you, for things that you already know are no longer of any interest to you. You cannot call these things that I show you unreal. Pages of newspapers are full of incidents, but since they have not happened to us we think they are unreal." [Dabashi, M&M, 257]

Filmography:

• Thundershower (1971)
• Journey (1972)
• The Stranger and the Fog (1974)
• Crow (1976)
• The Ballad of Tara (1979)
• The Death of Yazdegerd (1982)
• Bashu the Little Stranger (1986)
• The Travellers (1992)

Resources:

http://offscreen.com/view/bahram_baizai