Iranian Filmmaker Bahram Beyzaie Dies at 87 on His Birthday

Prominent Iranian filmmaker, playwright, and scholar Bahram Beyzaie has died in the United States at the age of 87. Independent journalist Mansour Jahani confirmed that Beyzaie passed away on Friday due to complications from cancer. He died on his birthday.

Beyzaie was widely regarded as one of the most important figures in modern Iranian culture. His work shaped generations of filmmakers, writers, and theater artists, both inside Iran and abroad.

One of his most celebrated films, Bashu, the Little Stranger, received renewed international attention this year. A restored version of the 1985 classic was screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, where it won the Venice Classics award for best restored film.

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi paid tribute to Beyzaie, calling him his “great teacher.”
“His works, his words, and above all his deep love for Iranian culture guided me with all my heart,” Farhadi wrote. He described it as deeply painful that Beyzaie died far from his homeland, despite being, in his words, “one of the most Iranian of Iranians.”

Born in Tehran on Dec. 26, 1938, Beyzaie grew up in a family of poets and literary scholars. Over a career spanning decades, he directed 10 feature films, four short films, and 14 stage plays. He also wrote more than 70 books, essays, plays, and screenplays.

Beyzaie was a leading figure of Iranian New Wave cinema. Alongside Bashu, the Little Stranger, his best-known films include Downpour (1972) and Killing Rabids (2001). His work often explored identity, displacement, history, and myth, drawing heavily from ancient Iranian literature and Indo-Iranian mythology.

Beyond filmmaking, Beyzaie was a major scholar of theater. His 1965 book Theatre in Iran remains a landmark study of traditional Iranian performance forms, including Naqali storytelling, puppetry, passion plays, and comic folk theater. He also wrote influential research on One Thousand and One Nights and studied Indian, Chinese, and Japanese performing arts.

Beyzaie was a founding member of several major cultural organizations, including the Iranian Writers Association. He also served as chair of the dramatic arts department at the University of Tehran.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, his work was frequently censored, and he was forced to resign from his university post. In 2010, he left Iran and later joined Stanford University as a lecturer in Iranian studies, where he continued to teach, stage plays, and lead workshops on Iranian mythology.

Beyzaie was a member of the Film Academy and was invited to join the Oscars voting body in 2024, a recognition of his lasting influence on world cinema.

With his passing, Iran and the global film community have lost a towering cultural figure whose work preserved tradition while pushing artistic boundaries.