Rakhshān Banī Iʿtimād is an Iranian director, screenwriter, and producer who has directed and produced over twenty documentaries and twelve feature films. She studied cinema at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Tehran. In the 1970s, she worked as the production secretary for a couple of TV films. She began her career as a documentary filmmaker in the early 1980s and as a filmmaker in 1987 with Khārij az mahdūdah (Off the Limits). Her most notable features include Rūsarī-i ābī (The Lady in the Blue Scarf; 1994), Bānū-yi urdībihisht (The Lady of the Month of May; 1997), and Zīr-i pūst-i shahr (Under the City’s Skin; 2000), which vary in terms of genre. Banī Iʿtimād’s early experiences in working with Iranian television to make documentaries about social issues led her to make fiction films in the realistic genre and to criticize the problems of Iranian society as a social activist. The variety in Banī Iʿtimād’s works is derived from the early beginnings of her career as a documentary filmmaker in the early 1980s, which give her films socially grounded themes largely pertaining to social and economic issues, and which in turn are framed in dramatic arcs of female protagonists engaging with social outcasts and marginalized individuals of society.  

Her fiction film Nargis (Narcissus; 1991) follows the larger theme of her works, but its plot is entwined in love triangles, familial difficulties, and pressures to reconcile family, love, and career. It is the first film of a trilogy that includes Bānū-yi urdībihisht and Zīr-i pūst-i shahr. It is through this trilogy of films that Banī Iʿtimād explores the intersectionality of class and gender, particularly exploring the struggles of marginalized women in society such as single mothers and those in complex familial dynamics.