Bahram Beyzaie died on his 87th birthday in the U.S.; tributes recall his censored career, years of exile at Stanford, and a legacy that reshaped Iranian theater and cinema.
Bahram Beyzaie, one of Iran’s most influential filmmakers and playwrights, a major scholar of Iranian theater, and a key figure of the Iranian New Wave, died in the United States on 5 Dey 1404, on his 87th birthday.
In a statement, Stanford University’s Iranian Studies program confirmed the news “with deep sorrow,” calling Beyzaie the pride of Iranian literature and art, and noting that he had been an outstanding and valued colleague of the program over the past fifteen years. The statement recalls that Beyzaie repeatedly emphasized that his true homeland and calling were the realm of culture. He loved Iran, and despite all the narrow-mindedness and pressures inflicted on him and his family by the government, he never ceased—even for a moment—to highlight and safeguard Iran’s cultural heritage.
The program announced that it will soon hold a ceremony to honor the life and works of this singular artist, lover of Iran, and Iranologist.
The statement also extended special thanks to Mojdeh Shamsaei, the wife of the late Bahram Beyzaie, noting that without her constant empathy and companionship, Beyzaie’s life and work in recent years would have taken on a different color and meaning.
Shamsaei, speaking to the depth of her loss, said that after his departure the world has become empty and meaningless for her: the earth without his footsteps feels unsteady, the air without his breath tight, and the sky without the gaze of his sky-colored eyes colorless. She considers the mountains, without Beyzaie’s steadfastness, hollow and without form; roads as detours; the homeland as merely an empty name; and love as nothing but a word without content—because there is no longer anyone to offer it to her. Shamsaei went on to write:
My life is a burden on my shoulders when it does not pass with him…
Migration and the Years of Exile: From Banned Works to Separation from Iran
Bahram Beyzaie was one of the most prominent figures in Iranian literature, theater, and cinema, known as a director, playwright, screenwriter, researcher, and university professor. He was considered one of the pioneers of Iran’s New Wave cinema, and his works—films such as Downpour, Bashu, the Little Stranger, The Death of Yazdgerd, The Travelers, and Killing Mad Dogs—combined Iranian myth, history, and theatrical elements, and carried a distinctive philosophical and aesthetic depth. Beyzaie wrote more than 70 books, plays, and screenplays, conducted major research on theater in Iran, Japan, and China, and from 2010 taught Iranian Studies at Stanford University.
Beyzaie’s last feature film, When We Are All Asleep, was produced in 2008/1387. After that, because he had been deprived of the possibility of artistic work in Iran, he went to the United States to teach at Stanford University.
Admirers of Beyzaie and his work had asked him to return to Iran. In Mehr 1392 (September–October 2013), in response, this prominent artist and filmmaker published a handwritten note. Beyzaie wrote:
In reply to your kindness, there are not many words of thanks—words that would not fall short before your kindness, and that no one has said a thousand times! They sow kindness and reap wrath; there are not many words, except what I say in my heart, without commotion, if it is eloquent—because it is from you that my heart still beats; a bow to a land I have not left; a bow to my mother and father who are the soil of that soil! Far be that drought and lie! Far be that demon of rage and greed; far be that oppression!
In an interview with Andisheh Poya, Beyzaie said he was, as in all these years, waiting for Tehran’s sky to open, hoping for a wind and rain that would wash away every polluted air. He also complained:
I don’t think that by leaving Iran I lost any important opportunity. Film and stage, yes—if there had been a path to my liking—but it is not worth a penny compared to losing what I lost: a lifetime queued for hearing “no,” being kept from other works! I gave rest to those who, in truth, had no work other than resting, and I came for a job elsewhere in the world—and exactly 30 years after they threw me out of the university, I returned to a university.
Over several decades of professional activity in Iran, Beyzaie repeatedly faced state-imposed interruptions and forced suspensions of his work. These included the banning of completed films such as The Death of Yazdgerd (permanently banned after a single screening at the Fajr Festival in 1982/1361), Bashu, the Little Stranger (banned for five years, from 1985/1364 to 1990/1369), and The Travelers (a nine-month delay in its screening permit in 1992/1371, accompanied by numerous demands for changes); obstruction of the production of screenplays such as Occupation and Destination (around 2009/1388—initial permits were issued, then unacceptable barriers were imposed); deprivation of the right to stage theater in Iran; and finally his departure into exile in 2010/1389, after an accumulation of obstacles and the loss of hope for continuing his work.
These interruptions were not only the result of political content. They were rooted in a censorship system, in the ideological and security interpretations of individual censors, in an exhausting bureaucratic strategy of delays and contradictory demands for changes, and at times in permanent bans—none of which could tolerate Beyzaie’s critical perspective on history and society. The result of this persistent crisis was that Iran’s artistic community was deprived of many works by this major filmmaker and playwright, and that Beyzaie chose a self-imposed exile; even in his final years, he never received permission to return and work in Iran.
Artistic Work in Exile
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Bahram Beyzaie’s presence at Stanford University, a two-day virtual symposium was held. Speakers including Abbas Milani (director of the Iranian Studies center), Zhaleh Amoozgar, Hamid Amjad, Sahand Abidi, Mandana Zandian, Negar Mottahedeh, Amirhossein Siyadat, Saeed Talajoy, and Amir Naderi discussed various dimensions of Beyzaie’s work. Beyzaie, in a message, listed his achievements of that decade: staging plays such as Jana and Bladur, The Report of Arda Viraf, Tarab-nameh, and Chaharrah, alongside holding four acting workshops. Reflecting on his artistic situation in Iran, he asked:
If I had spent these ten years in my country, what would my result have been, and what would I have had in hand? Would they kindly have allowed me to make the film Destination the way I wanted, or Mahi, or It Doesn’t Just Happen, or even Sanad—or my dreamed films The Scroll of Sheikh Sharzin, Occupation, and, of course, The Unbelievable Story?
Beyzaie then added that the play Dash Akol as Told by Marjan was not performed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The play was intended to go on stage on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Sadegh Hedayat’s death.
The play Dash Akol as Told by Marjan, written by Bahram Beyzaie in the second half of the 2010s/late 1390s, was based on Sadegh Hedayat’s story “Dash Akol.” A portion of it was first published on 5 Dey 1398 in the newspaper Hamshahri. Eventually, the first half was staged in autumn 1403 and the second half in summer 1404 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley, California, directed by Beyzaie. The published script was released simultaneously with the second part’s performance, in Mordad 1404, by Bisheh Publications in San Francisco.
In Dash Akol as Told by Marjan, Beyzaie, through a new, woman-centered approach, brings Hedayat’s classic narrative from the margins to the center by shifting the focal point to Marjan—silent and passive in the original—and offers a critical rereading of the myth of luti masculinity and romantic love. By creating complex characters such as Mahbanu (Marjan’s mother) and emphasizing the role of Sheikh al-Shari‘a, Beyzaie reveals hidden layers of power, religion, and society, and expands the tragedy of Dash Akol from an individual level into a socio-political arena. This re-creation is not mere retelling; it is a response to Hedayat’s “unsaid things” and textual questions, transformed—through Beyzaie’s signature play with time, symbolic staging, and poetic speech—into a multi-voiced, allegorical work. The play’s dark, elegiac scenography, in harmony with its themes of mourning and thwarted love, also evokes a condensed image of Iran’s collective history, presenting Beyzaie as a living memory of Iranian theater and literature—one who, in exile, both rekindles the longing to witness Iranian theater and makes its absence more sharply felt.
Beyzaie’s Idea-Driven Cinema: A Deep Fusion of Theater, Myth, and Social Critique
The relationship between theater and cinema in Beyzaie’s work can be summarized as the creation of a unique, multi-media artistic world in which the conventional boundaries between the two forms dissolve. With deep roots in research on Iranian performance traditions, Beyzaie made his cinema intrinsically “theatrical”—or more precisely, “performative”: not in the sense of spatial limitation, but through a heavy reliance on elevated, literary dialogue, complex and multi-layered narrative structures, and a symbolic play with time and place. Just as in Dash Akol as Told by Marjan we encounter nested and allegorical narration, in films such as Perhaps Another Time or The Death of Yazdgerd linear narrative is set aside so that mythic and critical concepts can be presented in a cyclical, contemplative form. In other words, Beyzaie’s camera is the eye of a spectator in an expanded stage, capturing the world of myth, history, and the human psyche, while elements of Iranian performance (such as ta‘ziyeh and naqqali) are recreated through a modern gaze. For him, cinema and theater were not two separate fields, but two complementary statements for a critical rereading of Iranian identity and for exploring philosophical and social questions beyond time.
Bahram Beyzaie’s cinema is an idea-driven and profoundly Iranian cinema, built on three main pillars: the critical redefinition of myths and history and their connection to the present from the perspective of victims and the oppressed (as in The Death of Yazdgerd and Tara’s Ballad); the creation of innovative narrative forms through non-linear mythic time, suspended settings and characters, and a departure from classical Hollywood structures (as in Perhaps Another Time, The Travelers, and Stranger and the Fog); and a deep fusion of literature with cinema through elevated dialogue and dramatic structures where storytelling and idea-making take precedence over purely visual appeal—an approach visible throughout his oeuvre.
Beyzaie was also among the founders of Iran’s New Wave cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (with works such as Downpour, Stranger and the Fog, and The Crow). As a socially engaged intellectual, he consistently embedded sharp political, cultural, and social critiques in his works—among them Bashu, the Little Stranger and Killing Mad Dogs—offering enduring reflections on power, violence, and cultural memory.
