Abbas Kiarostami was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–1994), Close-Up (1990), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Taste of Cherry (1997), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. In later works, Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012), he filmed for the first time outside Iran: in Italy and Japan, respectively. His films Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Close-Up, and The Wind Will Carry Us were ranked among the 100 best foreign films in a 2018 critics' poll by BBC Culture. Close-Up was also ranked one of the 50 greatest movies of all time in the famous decennial Sight & Sound poll conducted in 2012.
Following a crackdown on Iranian media beginning in 2000, many Iranians turned to weblogging to provide and find political news. The first Persian language blog is thought to have been created by Hossein Derakhshan,, in 2001. Derakhshan also provided readers with a simple instruction manual in Persian on how to start a blog. In 2004, a census of blogs around the world by the NITLE found 64,000 Persian language blogs. In that year the Islamic government also began to arrest and charge bloggers as political dissidents and by 2005 dozens of bloggers had been arrested.
Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurdish film director, producer and writer. He belongs to the "new wave" of Iranian cinema.
Pejman Akbarzadeh is a Persian-Dutch pianist, journalist, music historian and documentary maker.
Mohammad Hossein-Zadeh Hejazi was an Iranian military commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Radio Zamaneh is an Amsterdam-based Persian language exile news platform and former radio broadcaster with a leftist approach. "Zamaneh" is the Persian literary term for "time".
Through the Olive Trees is a 1994 Iranian drama film written, produced, edited and directed by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The final part of Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, the plot, set in earthquake-ravaged Northern Iran, revolves around the production of the second film; And Life Goes On..., which itself was a revisitation of the first film - Where Is the Friend's Home?.
Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian-born American poet and writer on issues of feminism, war, refugees, human rights, a filmmaker on women’s issues, Shari'a Law, freedom of expression, and an activist for women's rights, minorities rights, children's rights, human rights and refugees' rights. She grew up in Pakistan and Denmark, and now lives in the United States.
Religious intellectualism in Iran is a process that involves philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and cultural theorists.
Malek Shafi’i is a film director, producer, festival organiser, and human rights activist from Afghanistan.
Bahman Sholevar is an Iranian-American novelist, poet, translator, critic, psychiatrist and political activist. He began writing and translating at age 13. At ages 18 and 19 he translated William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land into Persian, and these still are renowned as two classics of translation in modern Persian literature. In 1967, after his first novel The Night's Journey was banned in Iran, he immigrated to the United States and in 1981 he became a dual citizen of the United States and Iran. Although most of his writings in the past 42 years have been in English, published outside Iran; although The Night's Journey has never been allowed republication, though sold in thousands of unlicensed copies; and although the Persian version of his last novel, Dead Reckoning, has never been given a "publication permit" in Iran, at their latest re-appraisals some Iranian critics have named him "the most influential Persian writer of the past four decades," "one who has had the most influence on the writers of the younger generations."
Gholām-Hossein Sā'edi MD was a prolific Iranian writer.
Ali (Alexander) Rahbari is an Iranian composer and conductor who has worked with more than 120 European orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Opera.
Nematollah Fazeli is an Iranian anthropologist, author, and translator.
Hossein Rajabian is an Iranian filmmaker, writer and photographer who was imprisoned as a political prisoner in 2015 on charges related to his filmmaking. He is an anti-censorship filmmaker and defender of freedom of speech for the arts.
The Upside-down Triangle is the first feature film by Iranian independent filmmaker Hossein Rajabian. The black-and-white film has been shot and directed by Rajabian – who has been involved in photography for years – using digital cinema technology. The shooting of the film kicked off in mid-February 2013 and came to an end in early May 2013. Snowfall in Central Alborz in northern Iran and challenges associated with local arrangements led to the shooting being prolonged. This film was banned by Iranian government and has not been screened anywhere, any festival, etc.
Mansour Koushan (Persian: منصور کوشان) was a prominent Iranian novelist, poet, playwright, editor and director. He received the Ossietzky Award in 2010 for his outstanding work for human rights and freedom of expression. He was an active member of Iranian Writers’ Association and a strong opponent to the Iranian regime. In December 1998 Koushan was invited by the Norwegian Forum for Freedom of Expression to deliver a speech at the 50th anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights Charter. Not long after, he received news that two of his friends and colleagues Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad-Ja'far Pouyandeh had been abducted and killed in Tehran. His name was likewise on the regimes death list. These killings were part of what is known as Chain Murders of Iran. Koushan was then forced to live in exile and resided in Norway the rest of his life.
Majid Naficy, also spelled "Majid Nafisi" and "Madjid Nafissi", is an Iranian-American poet. He was the youngest member of the literary circle Jong-e Isfahan and was considered the Arthur Rimbaud of Persian poetry in the late 1960s in Iran. He was a member of the Confederation of Iranian Students in Los Angeles in 1971, and a member of the independent Marxist Peykar Organization after the Iranian Revolution from August 1979 until spring 1982.
Ali "Alireza" Fazeli Monfared was a 20-year-old Iranian man who was kidnapped and decapitated by three men, namely his half-brother and two cousins, near the city of Ahvaz in Iran's Khuzestan Province because of his sexual orientation. News of the situation garnered significant social media attention and coverage and calls by activists and celebrities to challenge homophobia in Iran.
