Brick and Mirror

Iranian writer, photographer, translator, publisher, and filmmaker.

Ebrahim Golestan was born in Shiraz. He went to Tehran to attend the University of Tehran, then the only secular college in Iran. He studied law at the university but was attracted to socialist ideas. In 1944 he joined the Tudeh, Iran’s most important Marxist political party. In the ideological debates that splintered the party following the Azerbaijan Crisis, Golestan sided with the reformists led by Khalil Maleki and joined him and other dissidents in resigning from the Tudeh in early 1948. That same year his first collection of short stories, Azar, mah-e akhar-e payiz (Azar, the last month of autumn), was published. Although he continued to write stories, in the early 1950s his main occupation became filmmaking. During a twenty-year period, Golestan wrote the scripts for, directed, and produced several films. His movie A Fire was the first Iranian film to receive an international award, winning a bronze medal at the 1961 Venice Film Festival.

In 1958 Golestan met and hired for his film studio the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Because he was married and a father, his eight-year relationship with her was controversial. In the mid-1970s Golestan moved to Britain, where he resettled permanently. He continued to write short stories in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2003 his son, photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, was killed by a land mine while covering the U.S. war in Iraq. —Mideast & N. Africa Encyclopedia