Mohammad Ali Fardin

A former wrestling champion, Fardin was the biggest star in Iran’s cinema during the 1960s and early 1970s. He acted and sometimes directed films in the luti genre, playing the proletarian rogue with the heart of gold, who rejects Westernization and materialism yet does not challenge the status quo (Champion of Champions [Siamak Yasami, 1965]; The Treasures of Gharun [Yasami, 1965]). He made only one film after the Iranian Revolution of 1979: The Damned (Iraj Qaderi, 1982), an attempt to update the luti character in the newly installed Islamic Republic and in the context of the war with Iraq. Banned from further film acting along with many other prerevolutionary actors, Fardin nevertheless stayed in Iran, where the “King of Hearts,” as he was affectionately known after his 1968 film of that name, remained popular; his funeral in central Tehran attracted a crowd estimated at 20,000.

Niki Karimi

Karimi is an award-winning Iranian ac­tress, film director, and translator. Dariush Mehrjui’s Sara, based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, gave Karimi her first nationally and internationally acclaimed role, an emotionally charged rendering of the title character, Sara, a woman on the verge of discovering the truth about her exploitative and loveless marriage. She is best known, however, for her work with Iranian director Tahmineh Milani (Two Women, The Hidden Half, and The Fifth Reaction), in which Karimi portrays, with a complex vulnerability, the challenges facing modern Iranian women caught on the cusp of religious and secular identities. Karimi, fluent in Persian, French, and English, translated Marlon Brando’s biography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, into Farsi and made her directorial debut in 2001 with To Have or Not to Have, a documentary about infertility produced by Abbas Kiarostami. Karimi’s feature film directorial debut, One Night (2005), was nominated in the “Un Certain Regard” category at the Cannes Film Festival.