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Bahram Beyzaii (Persian: !"#$%& ‏,&*(ام born 26 December
1938 in Tehran) is an Iranian film director, theatre director,
screenwriter, playwright, film editor, producer, and researcher.
Beyzaii is part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian
New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the
late 1960s and includes other pioneering directors such as Abbas
Kiarostami, Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless,
and Parviz Kimiavi. The filmmakers share many common
techniques including the use of poetic dialog, references to
traditional Persian art and culture and allegorical storytelling
often dealing with political and philosophical issues.
Beyzaii was interested in the arts from a very young age. In
high school he wrote two historical plays which went on to become
his preferred method of writing. He studied literature
at Tehran University.
At the age of 21 he did substantial research on the traditional
Persian plays, Book of Kings (Shahname) and Ta'zieh and by
1961 he had already spent a great deal of time studying-and
researching other ancient Persian and pre-Islamic culture
and literature. This in turn led him to studying Eastern Theatre
and traditional Iranian theatre and arts which would help
him formulate a new non-western identity for Iranian theatre.
He also became acquainted with Perisan painting. By late
1961 he had already published numerous articles in various
arts and literary journals. In 1962 he made his first short film
(4 minutes) in 8 mm format. In the next two years he wrote
several plays and published "Theatre in Japan".
In the next eight years of his life throughout the early to late
1960s, Beyzaii dedicated to writing in various publications
about Eastern art and Persian literature enabled through his
extensive study and also wrote a number of essays about Iranian
cinema which later became the subject of one of his
books. It is during this period he write the popular books
which are often regarded as masterpieces; The Eight Voyage
of Sinbad, Banquet, Serpant King, Dolls, The Story of the
Hidden Moon and many more.
In 1968, Beyzaii became one of the first people to join the
Iranian Writer's Guild, a highly controversial organization in
Iran in the face of censorship, known as the Kanun-e
Nevisandegan-e-Iran.
Theatrical career and playwriting
As a young man Bayzai had always been fascinated by the traditions
of Iranian theatre, and this included the puppet theatre.
His Seh Nemayesh Nameh-ye 'Arusaki ("Three Puppet
Plays") was published in 1963, and The Marionettes was the
first of these three plays. But for all that it is unmistakably
based on the model of the traditional puppet theatre, The
Marionettes is shaped by other traditions too.
It is the work of someone au fait with the work of Pirandello
and the Theatre of the Absurd. In the 1960s plays by dramatists
such as Beckett and Ionesco were often translated into
the Persian language and performed in Iran soon after their
premieres in the West). Drawing on these varied influences,
Beyzaii's play is a little-known master-piece of twentiethcentury
drama. The majority of his films such as Death of
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