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Farhang Foundation mourns the passing of Bahram Beyzaie, the towering master of Iranian cinema, theater, and literature, who left us on his birthday on December 26, 2025. His passing marks a profound and irreparable loss to Iranian art, culture and to the legacy of world cinema.

An award-winning filmmaker, theater director, playwright, educator, and preeminent scholar of Iranian performance traditions, Bahram Beyzaie was among the most original and influential artistic voices of the modern era. As one of the leading figures of the Iranian New Wave beginning in the late 1960s, he played a decisive role in revitalizing Iran’s performing arts by boldly weaving Iranian mythology and traditional theatrical forms into modern theater and cinema. His work was distinguished by intellectual rigor, poetic force, and an unwavering commitment to cultural memory and artistic integrity.
Over a remarkable career spanning more than five decades, Beyzaie authored more than seventy books, monographs, plays, screenplays, and scholarly studies, alongside numerous influential essays. He directed fourteen staged plays, ten feature films, and four short films, each bearing his unmistakable signature of mythic depth, formal precision, and philosophical inquiry.

Among his most celebrated cinematic works is Bashu, The Little Stranger (1989), widely regarded as one of the greatest films in the history of Iranian cinema. Through the story of a young war-displaced boy and the woman who shelters him, Beyzaie offered a timeless meditation on identity, belonging, language, and compassion, one that continues to resonate across cultures and generations. His other landmark films, including Downpour, The Stranger and the Fog, Death of Yazdgerd, Travelers, Maybe Some Other Time, and Death of Yazdgerd stand as enduring testaments to his visionary storytelling and profound engagement with history, power, and human resilience.

Equally transformative were Beyzaie’s contributions to theater and scholarship. He served for many years as Head of the Theater Arts Department at the University of Tehran, where he shaped the intellectual foundation of modern Iranian theater studies. His seminal book Theatre in Iran (1965) remains an authoritative and foundational account of Iranian theater history, preserving traditions that might otherwise have been lost.

Since his arrival at Stanford University in 2010, Bahram Beyzaie served as a professor for the past fifteen years, teaching courses on Iranian theater and cinema, staging plays, and leading workshops on Iranian mythology and film. At Stanford, as throughout his life, he inspired students with his vast knowledge, uncompromising standards, and deep belief in the power of art as cultural memory and moral inquiry.

Bahram Beyzaie was not only a master artist and scholar, but a guardian of Iranian cultural heritage and a fearless thinker whose work consistently resisted erasure, simplification, and forgetting. While his passing leaves a profound void, his voice endures, alive in his films, his plays, his writings, and in the countless artists, scholars, and audiences shaped by his vision.

Farhang Foundation extends its heartfelt condolences to Ms. Mojdeh Shamsaie, as well as to his family, friends, students, and admirers around the world. We honor Bahram Beyzaie’s extraordinary life and legacy with deep gratitude and enduring respect. His contributions to Iranian art, culture and world cinema will remain eternal.