In Brief

Mahdī Mīs̱āqiyyah (born in Tehran, 1927–1989) was an Iranian movie producer. Mīs̱āqiyyah started his career as an actor but soon, along with other filmmakers, he established the Kārūn Film Studio (1952). He later founded Studio Mīs̱āqiyyah (1959), where he produced some of the most iconic movies of the pre-revolutionary Iran. Mīs̱āqiyyah’s innovations in technical fields, scene design, filming, editing and even the use of music and sound, which were much more advanced than his time, led to the improvement of the production quality of fiction films and made it possible to compete with foreign films at the box office. For example, at the age of 30, he independently produced the movie Shabʹnishīnī dar jahanam (A Party in Hell), (1956), which was a great success at the box office in 1957. After his death in exile, many screenplays that were originally planned to be produced by his studio were approved for production and screening by the Islamic Republic.