Filmmaker and screenwriter, Muhsin Makhmalbāf was born in 1957 to a poor family in Tehran. From the age of eight he started working different jobs to support his family until he joined a guerilla group at the age of seventeen, participating in political activities for a long time. He left school and was detained for his radical activities against the Shah’s regime. During imprisonment, Makhmalbāf started writing stories. After the Revolution of 1979, he turned to cinema and filmmaking with a strong religious ideology. Makhmalbāf rose to fame in 1989 with Arūsī-yi Khūbān (The Marriage of the Blessed). Over time, he became a critic of the regime of the Islamic Republic and its policies, so much so that he left Iran in 2004. To date, he has made more than twenty feature films. Makhmalbāf’s later films are very different from his early works in terms of tone and technique. He is the winner of some fifty international film awards. In the past decade, his films, including Bāghiban (The Gardener; 2012) and Prizīdint (The President; 2014), have been widely screened at international film festivals. Makhmalbāf is an outstanding director of the New Wave movement of Iranian cinema. In 2001, Time magazine selected his film Kandahar as one of the top 100 films of all time.