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After returning to Iran, Shahid Saless took a job as a documentary filmmaker with Iran’s Ministry of Culture, where he produced ethnographic films about the folkloric culture of different ethnic groups in rural Iran. It was also during this period that Shahid Saless made a name for himself as one of the founders of Iranian New Wave cinema with his features Yek Ettefāq-e Sādeh (A Simple Event), which won the Grand Prize at the Tehran Film Festival, and Tabi’at-e Bijān (Still Life).

But when Shahid Saless eventually shifted his focus in his documentary films to the deplorable conditions faced by the Iranian working class, he fell out of favor with the government and was forced to flee Iran for Germany in 1974. Although he struggled as an exile in Germany without any permanent immigration status, he continued producing films for German cinema and television until the stress from having to constantly raise funds to finance his projects became too great, and he decided to move to the US. He spent only two years in the US before passing away in Chicago in 1998.

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Barely 23 years old when he first arrived, Zenderoudi found the French capital “fabulous” and soon struck up friendships with Alberto Giacometti, Eugène Ionesco, and Serge Poliakoff. “The artistic and literary scene in Paris was extraordinary, without borders, and I was part of this world,” recalls Zenderoudi. Nearly 50 years later, Zenderoudi’s works—rich tapestries often filled with beautiful calligraphy—can be found in prestigious collections worldwide: at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at MOMA in New York, in the British Museum in London. Restany has described his oeuvre as typifying a  “synthesis between East and West.” In 2008, Zenderoudi’s Tchaar Bagh was sold at Christie’s in Dubai for $1.6 million.

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She used her considerable influence to promote the arts and culture to establish a series of museums and institutions that live on today in different guises. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the Reza Abbassi Museum, the Carpet Museum, the Glass Museum, the Shiraz Art Festival, and the Tehran Festival of Films are among a long list of such accomplishments. Many of Iran’s most influential filmmakers—Abbas Kiaroastami, Amir Naderi, and Bahram Beyzai, among them—got their start making movies and programs for the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & Young Adults that she helped create. 

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Having been imprisoned and tortured by the shah’s regime in 1974 due to his political and literary activities, Sa’edi welcomed the change of regime in Iran five years later. But the ultimate consolidation of the Islamist Khomeini faction in the Revolution, the subsequent crackdown on political and cultural expression, and the threat of incarceration or worse ultimately compelled Sa’edi to flee Iran for Paris. There he resumed his editorship of the journal Alefba and continued producing narrative fiction, but the toll that exile was taking on him was already manifest. In 1985, Sa’edi was diagnosed with cirrhosis after years of heavy drinking, and he died of a stroke that November.

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Pezeshkzad studied law in France between 1948 and 1952, and served as a judge in the Iranian judiciary for five years before joining the foreign service under the Shah. Following the 1979 revolution, he settled in Paris where he was politically active in Shapour Bakhtiar’s political party, the National Movement of Iranian Resistance, against the Islamic Republic. He wrote for the party’s political publications, including “Moroori bar vagheye 15 khordad 42,” a booklet reviewing how US pressure on the Shah to grant Americans immunity from prosecution paved the way for Khomeini to build a political base in 1963. 

Pezeshkzad is a prolific writer, whose first book, Haji Mam-ja’far in Paris, published in 1954, is a satire about a man from a traditional Iranian milieu on a romp through Paris. 

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In his early days as a high school teacher in Iran, Shariati founded the Islamic Students’ Association and was arrested several times for his activism. Receiving a scholarship to study in Paris, he worked with the French Iranologist, philosopher, and theologian Henri Corbin. As his advisor, Corbin oversaw Shariati’s thesis, a hagiography of a Sufi mystic. In 1960, Shariati began to read Frantz Fanon and translated an anthology of his work into Persian. Later he began a correspondence with Fanon about his ideas and criticized him for missing the role religion could play in anti-colonialist movements.

Shariati returned to Iran profoundly influenced by his experiences in Paris and quickly grew in popularity among Iran’s youth. His fiery speeches on social justice and the need to return to an “authentic,” purist version of Shia Islam quickly turned into small illegal booklets that circulated among the religious intellectuals of the period. To many young Iranians of the 1970s, his version of Islam looked “modern“ and a viable alternative to Marxism, then popular among secular intellectuals.

Shortly after his return to Iran in 1964, Shariati was jailed. A few months into his jail sentence, he managed to convince the Iranian secret police, SAVAK, to release him on the grounds that he was a danger only to Marxism, not the Shah’s regime. While he did indeed argue against Marxism, his own writings were heavily influenced by Marxist ideas.

In the years leading up to the Revolution, Shariati was probably the most influential public intellectual in Iran. He died in the UK in 1977 at the age of 43.

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