Bahram Beyzaie
Bahram Beyzaie (1938–2025) was an Iranian filmmaker, playwright, scholar, and educator who was central to the Iranian New Wave. Born in Tehran to a Baháʼí poet father, he turned to theatre and cinema after teenage years spent skipping school for the movie houses, and rose to lead the Theatre Department at the University of Tehran's College of Fine Arts from 1972 to 1979. He drew freely on Indo-Iranian mythology and traditional Iranian performing arts in plays and films alike, beginning his directing career around 1970. His Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986) — about an Arab-Iranian boy from the south taken in by a northern peasant woman during the Iran–Iraq War — was voted the best Iranian film of all time in a major 1999 critics' poll and won Best Film in the Classics section at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. From 2010 he lived and taught at Stanford University.