When a consortium of western oil companies took over the operation of the Iranian oil industry in 1954, Ebrahim Golestan, one of Iran’s leading intellectuals and writers, was recruited to work in public relations at the new company and put in charge of making educational films.
In 1957 he founded his own Golestan Studios and in 1959, after he had severed ties with the oil consortium, he negotiated the buyout of the equipment with which he had made their documentaries. With this equipment, his studio became the most sophisticated centre for film-making in Iran.
For some years, Golestan, who has died aged 100, enjoyed a near-monopoly in the lucrative market of supplying film clips and photographs to the western media, and satisfying the appetite for television images of Iran. His 1961 film A Fire, about a blaze at an Iranian oil well, won a prize at the Venice short film festival; his 1964 feature film Brick and Mirror was shown in the Venice classics section at the 2018 festival.
In 1958 the feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad joined his studio. He was married, she divorced, and they started an intense love affair. He produced her documentary The House Is Black (1963), now recognised as an important film of the Iranian new wave.
Farrokhzad wrote openly about her feelings, angering some men but, as the writer Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa points out, “she became a cultural martyr, a myth, a sacred figure, the most beloved, respected and popular modern poet”. Iranians called her their Sylvia Plath, not least because she died young, in a car crash, in 1967.
Her death overwhelmed Golestan, but perhaps also inspired guilt. In their letters she had written to him: “I love you and I love you to an extent that I am terrified what to do if you disappeared suddenly. I’ll become like an empty well.” In contrast, Golestan wrote, years later: “We were very close but I can’t measure how much I had feelings for her.”
After her death, Golestan opted for exile. The only time he returned for any length of time to Iran was in 1971 to make the film Secrets of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley, which was deemed to be critical of the Shah and of the prime minister Abbas Hoveyda. Golestan’s earlier film The Crown Jewels of Iran (1965) was equally blunt. He wrote of these jewels as souvenirs of closed minds “besotted by toys”.
In the 1970s, Golestan sold his studio and made his permanent home in Britain, in the West Sussex village of Bolney. His wife and two children remained in Iran.
Golestan was born in the city of Shiraz, south-west Iran. His father, Mohammad Taghi Golestan, published a liberal newspaper called Golestan and his parents’ house was an important literary and political salon. Ebrahim became fluent in French and an exceptional athlete. He was educated first in Shiraz and in 1929 he was sent to school in Tehran, then began studies at Tehran University, but dropped out.
During the second world war he joined the communist Tudeh party and soon became editor of the party newspaper. When he decided to leave the party in 1946, he became a professional photographer. By then he had published his first collection of short stories, Dozdi Raftehar, and two years later he published an anthology titled Âzar, Mâh-e Âkher-e Pâ’iz (Azar, The Last Month of Autumn). He also translated works by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
In 1951 an impoverished Dylan Thomas was commissioned to write a film script for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. He flew to Tehran with his producer, Ralph “Bunny” Keane, and Golestan was sent to meet him. When Golestan referred to Thomas as English, the poet replied, “I am from Wales”.
Golestan told Thomas he was from Shiraz and quoted Hafez, the Shiraz poet stimulated by wine in his Sufi quest for beauty and, ultimately, a mystical union with God. Thomas said he had never heard of Hafez, but asked whether he was constantly drunk – and told Golestan he was himself thirsty and needed a lot of beer.
In 2022 Mitra Farahani made the documentary called See You Friday, Robinson, a wide-ranging conversation between Golestan and the French new wave film-maker Jean-Luc Godard.
His wife, Fakhri Taghavi Shirazi, whom he married in the 1940s, died in 2012. Their son, Kaveh, a photojournalist, was killed on assignment for the BBC in Iraq in 2003. He is survived by their daughter, Lili, a translator, and two grandsons, Mani and Mehrak.
• Ebrahim Golestan, film-maker, born 19 October 1922; died 22 August 2023
