Ebrahim golestan biography examples
Indeed, he is duly appreciative of the accomplishments as well as the weaknesses of both cultures. He views them both from the perspective of exile. Ebrahim Golestan was born in in Shiraz, to one of the city's most prominent families, his grandfather was an esteemed and defiant ayatollah—exiled by Reza Shah-and his father, a man of letters and politics and a member of the constitutional assembly that elected Reza Khan the king, for many years published a newspaper of liberal persuasion called Golestan.
The father was at once an intellectual and a man of gargantuan appetite for the pleasures of life. Golestan's mother was a woman of traditional ebrahim golestan biographies examples and sensibility, religious and unusually erudite. Young Golestan's parental home was a veritable literary and political salon, and it was there that the young Ebrahim met, for the first time, many of the famous writers and poets of the era.
Golestan also began to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about the world by devouring his father's books. At the behest of his father, he learned French and was fluent in it before he left high school. At the same time, he was an avid athlete, holding a national record in track for many years. He was educated first in Shiraz and then, inhe was sent to Tehran.
But the advent of the war had changed hitherto traditional Tehran. It had more ideological fluidity. Golestan soon joined the newly formed Communist Party and rapidly rose in its rank to become the editor of the party's paper. From his early youth, he was keenly interested in photography; when he decided to leave the party, aroundhe became a professional photographer.
By then he had published his first collection of short stories. Inwhen a consortium of Western oil companies took over the operation of the Iranian oil industry, Golestan joined the new company and was put in charge of making educational films. Inafter he had severed his ties with the consortium, he negotiated the buyout of the equipment he had purchased to make the documentaries.
With this equipment, his studio became the most sophisticated center for filmmaking in Iran. At the same time, well into the late s, he enjoyed a near-monopoly in the lucrative market of supplying film clips and photos to the increasingly large Western media and of assuaging the endless appetite of television for images of Iran. In the early s, his articles in the party press and the publication of his collection of short stories had already established his reputation as one of the country's leading intellectuals and writers.
He had married his cousin, Fakhri, and in the Iran of the ebrahim golestan biography examples, the marriage of cousins was said to be made in heaven. His wife was an intellectual and soon became a political activist. Together they had two children. Their daughter, Leeli, became an artist and critic, and their son, Kaveh, established his reputation as a photographer and photojournalist.
Intragedy struck the family when Kaveh, on assignment in Iraq with the BBC, was killed by a land mine. Golestan suffered the enormous grief in stoic silence. Inhe began an intense love affair with Forugh Farrokhzad, which lasted until her premature death in ; theirs is the most celebrated love affair in all of modern Persian literature.
His marriage continued in spite of the gossip that the tempestuous affair generated. The gradual tightening of political screws in Iran convinced Golestan that he must leave Iran. All his life, he had been, essentially, an autodidact. He felt Iran could no longer satisfy his curiosity. In the late s, he took a trip to France and, in his own words, spent some "six months just visiting museums and going to theaters and concerts.
After Farrokhzad's death—friends talked of his debilitating grief —he opted for exile. The only time he returned for any length of time was to make Mysteries of the Treasure of Ghost Valley. His wife and two children stayed in Iran. In fact, Golestan's "exile" was first emotional and epistemological, then gradually geographical. At the same time, he is deeply critical of the cultural fate that has befallen Iran.
This schism, he declares, has impacted our minds, as well as our vision of the world. In its encounter with the inevitable modern experience, Iran, according to Golestan, faces a crisis of historic propor-tions. Iranians, however, are unprepared for the implications of this encounter. Instead, they "have clung to appearances," and lulled themselves with the false comfort of facile answers.
In Golestan's view, Iranians know neither their own culture nor that of the West. In trying to understand either culture, they often suffer either from silly grandiosity or poisonous self-loathing. They have forfeited the task of arriving at fair, judicious, critical, and informed judgments about themselves and the west. Golestan's emotional and geographical distance from Iran afforded him the opportunity to arrive at radically different judgments.
For instructions on how to request the Iran collections, users can specialcollections [at] stanford. The English translation includes an introduction by Dr. Abbas Milani and scholar Alina Utrata as well as a personal essay by Dr. Milani on Golestan's life and work. About the Book: Abadan, Iran, Twenty-nine-year-old Ebrahim Golestan, who was to become a towering figure in Iranian cinema and literature, encounters Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, who died two years later at the age of thirty-nine from bronchial disease and pneumonia.
More for his celebrity than an intimate knowledge of the subject, Thomas had been sent to Iran by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to write a script for a propaganda…. Fakhri Golestan. Mani Haghighi grandson Mehrak Golestan grandson. Biography [ edit ]. Works [ edit ].
Ebrahim golestan biography examples
Books [ edit ]. Stories [ edit ]. Filmography [ edit ]. Documentaries [ edit ]. Drama [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Retrieved 6 December Retrieved 8 April ISBN Retrieved 25 September Vienna International Film Festival. Ebrahim Golestan co-directed this film with Alan Pendry in The film itself was requested by the National Oil Company and it revolves around the construction of the Gachsaran pipeline To Khark island.
Instead, there was a complex and dialectic relationship between what was viewed and heard. The scripts of his documentaries were at times official and informative, and at times unexpectedly poetic and heralds of broader concepts.