Tahmineh Milani

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Tahmineh Milani (Persian: تهمینه میلانی) is an Iranian film director, screenwriter, and producer. She was born 1960 in Tabriz, Iran. She is the wife of the Iranian actor and producer Mohammad Nikbin.

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[edit] Biography

After graduating in architecture from the University of Science and Technology in Tehran in 1986, she as an assistant director and gained a lot of experience. Milani started her career as a movie direcor with Children of Divorce in 1989.

In her recent films, she has dealt with problems and sufferings of women. She has received admirations and prizes for her movies especially for Two Women and "The 5th Reaction".

[edit] Her life as a director

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Milani did not hesitate to touch controversial and sensitive issues in her native Iran from the women's struggle in a male dominated society to 1979 Islamic Revolution, she paid the price by being sentenced to jail in Iran. She was charged with being anti-revolutionary due to the story line of her 2001 film Nimeh-e Pinhan 'the Hidden Half', the film was telling the story of a leftist university student girl who was active with the leftist movement during the upraising against the Shah regime. Tehran Revolutionary Court accused her of supporting the anti revolutionary forces. The love story between the girl and an elderly man in the film was also harshly criticized. Although the film was granted permission for production during the rule of the reformist Khatemi government, this permission of the legitimate government did not help Tahmineh Milani and the director got imprisoned in 2001. A world league of renowned international directors from Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese showed strong support to Milani and she was freed after two weeks in the prison, although the charges against her did not drop entirely.

Milani sets her stories around suffering but brave women who have to live in a tremendously oppressed regime where discrimination against women seem even natural. In the beginning of her cinematic career the director mainly told fable-like stories. Efsanye-e Ah ' The Legend of a Sigh!' - 1990, develops around a character called Maryam who sighs after her failure as an author and befriends the imaginary character of her own sigh! Sigh shows Maryam that there are women with bigger problems who still can manage to be happy. Two years later Milani tells us another tale in her film Dige Che Khabar? ' What Did You Do Again? This time protagonist is a little girl who can change her family as she wishes by only talking to herself. Nevertheless even telling fables can not save her from the strict rules of cencorship. Choosing a girl as the lead strikes as a problem, authorities ask the director to replace her with a spoilt little boy instead. Conservative hardliners blame Milani to encourage women to riot against the system. Milani thinks that what they are actually scared of is the possibility of their own wives to get encouraged to riot by those films. In later years, Milani develops a more melodramatic style and chooses to underline the gender clashes. Her female characters can be subjected to such intense oppression and discrimination that can be beyond the imagination of ordinary folk around the world.

Her 2005 film 'Unwanted Woman' is the extraordinary story of Sima who has to cover up a journey with a friend under the law which bans to travel together for unmarried couples. Vakonesh Panjom ' the Fifth Reaction' portrays the struggle of a woman who leaves her wealth, house and even children to her in-laws after the death of her husband. For an average cinema-goer, some of the story lines are really mind bending , but all those things happen in today's Iran. Slight exaggeration of the situations are set to raise awareness among people. We must add that actually those situations can be perceived by her native audience as toned down editions of the difficulties of daily life. Hence her each film is open to two different sub-reading. One can think that the exaggeration of the situations of her films can only lead to a mental clash with the logic and feel nothing but paranoia, or one can think the director did not intend a complicated path, but only chose an innocent way to show the oppression and discrimination of an extreme society.

Milani states that the main problem in Iran is the identity crisis. Both men and women lead double lives in Iran, one is behind the closed doors of the private homes and one is in the public eye of the society of weird extremisms. Both men and women have double faces. A kind of hypocrisy, what they really are and what they are asked to be by their families or the society.

[edit] Filmography (as a director)

  • Bach'che'hā-ye Talāgh (aka Children of Divorce), 1989
  • Afsāneh-ye Āh (aka The Legend of Sigh), 1991
  • Digeh che khabar? (aka What Else Is New?), 1992
  • Kakadu,[1] 1996
  • Do Zan (Two Women), 1999
  • Nimeh-ye Penhān (aka The Hidden Half), 2001
  • Vākonesh-e Panjom (aka The Fifth Reaction), 2003
  • Zane Ziyādi (aka The Unwanted Woman), 2005
  • Ātash Bas (aka Cease Fire), 2006


  1. ^ This is a science-fiction motion picture for children and young adults. It relates the story of a planet named Kakadu which is ruled by environmentalists. The punishment of polluters on this planet is spending one week on the planet Earth. See also Kakadu.

[edit] Awards and honors

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

  • Exclusive interview with Tahmineh Milani, in Farsi, August 6, 2007, bebin.tv/YouTube: Part 1 (9 min 8 sec), Part 2 (8 min 8 sec).


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