He was a writer of short stories before moving into cinema, influenced by the then golden era of modern Persian literature (e.g. Sadegh Hedayat). He was just as keenly interested by photography and cinema as he was by literature. He was from an upper-middle class background and benefited from advantageous connections. For a while, he was a member of the Iranian Socialist party (Tudeh).
Famously had a professional collaboration and a romantic liaison with Forough Farrokhzad.
Soon after the publication of his second collection of stories, Golestan shifted gear and established his movie studio, Golestan Films, in 1956. A Fire (1958) was among his first productions. The film was directed by Golestan, shot by his younger brother, Shahrokh Golestan and edited by Farrokhzad, was the very first Iranian film to receive acclaim at an international film festival.
In 1963, Golestan made Tappeh-ha-ye Marlik (Marlik Hills), a documentary about archeological excavations in northern Iran, which won him yet another award at the Venice Film Festival.
"There is no escaping the fact that Golestan's The Tide, the Coral, and the Granite (1961) is an effective over-aestheticization and simultaneous de-politicization of the neocolonial robbery of Iranian oil by a corrupt monarchy and a conglomerate of transnational oil companies. But at the same time, there is no escaping the equally important fact that the visual vocabulary of Iranian cinema and the poetic disposition of Golestan's prose are blossoming like beautiful water lilies on the surface of this very dirty swamp. This paradoxical phenomenon is endemic to the politics of Iranian poetics." [Dabashi, M&M]
In 1963, he started filming what is generally considered his masterpiece, the fiction feature Brick and Mirror.
Dabashi labels his style, both in his prose and in his films, as 'affective realism' (in the sense of affectation, artificial etc.). In this he sees an early link to the blend of fact and fantasy taken from pre-modern Persian literary and theatrical (taziyeh) traditions into Iranian cinema.
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