Rakhshan Banietemad

Rakhshān Banietemad (Persian: رخشان بنی‌اعتماد; born April 3, 1954, in Tehran, Iran) is an internationally and critically acclaimed Iranian film director and screenwriter who is widely considered a premier female director and her films have been praised at international festivals as well as being popular with Iranian critics and audiences. Her title as "First Lady of Iranian Cinema" is not only a reference to her prominence as a filmmaker, but also connotes her social role of merging politics and family in her work. Her signature style is that she focuses on a character representing a part of society to explore it while staying objectively neutral. The first period of Banietemad's cinematic activity originates from dark humor. Still, in the second period of her work, dark humor gives way to serious and influential films, and deeper and broader issues are addressed. Banietemad has a more realistic view of life. She excels in representing contemporary situations, often about the changing roles of women but also covering a broad spectrum of social issues, including war, poverty, domestic abuse, and class mobility. Banietemad's characters embody a sense of nostalgia in that women like Tooba (Golab Adineh), Nobar (Fatemah Motamed-Aria), and Sara (Baran Kosari) have... ()