Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Mohsen Makhmalbaf (born in Tehran, 29 May 1957) is one of the best-known names in contemporary Iranian cinema. A director, screenwriter, writer and producer, he belongs to the Iranian New Wave that emerged in the late 1980s, and his films, shown at major international festivals since the early 2000s, have offered audiences one of the most visible windows onto Iranian society.

He grew up in a poor and deeply religious district of Tehran. His parents separated soon after their wedding, and a bitter custody dispute led his father to take him and leave him for a time with an aunt, who gave him novels and religious texts that sparked his love of writing. He had to work from childhood to help his family, and at fifteen he joined a clandestine revolutionary group opposing the Shah. Arrested as a teenager after a violent confrontation with a policeman, he suffered torture that left lasting damage to his legs. The 1979 revolution brought his release and a change of direction: he gave up armed struggle for art and nonviolence, convinced that Iran's problems required a change in attitudes rather than in politics alone.

With no film training, he turned to cinema as a way of bringing culture to ordinary people. Early works such as The Cyclist (1987) portrayed hardship and endurance among humble people, often combined with reflections on cinema itself. Over the years he moved between realism, fable, surrealism and minimalism, always attentive to the tension between the individual and the social and political world around them. After the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad he left Iran, and he has since lived in several countries, including France.

In 1996 he set up a film school in his own home, after the Ministry of Culture refused to create such an institution. The project later became the family's production house, with his wife, Marzieh Meshkini, and their daughters taking part in filmmaking. His legacy lies in films, several of them banned in Iran, in his support for younger filmmakers, and in his humanitarian work in Afghanistan after Kandahar, a film that Time magazine placed among the greatest of all time.