Shahrzad: Iran's Pioneering Filmmaker Turned Wanderer

Kobra Saeedi, known by the stage name Shahrzad, was born and grew up in Tehran. According to the filmmaker Shahin Parhami, who made a documentary about her and spoke to the film journal Offscreen, she started as a dancer in her teens in small cafes and bars, then performed in upscale cabarets. She became a popular item-number woman in films, then a more serious actor in New Wave films, and later a writer-director and published poet.

She was a regular star of the Film Farsi productions of the 1960s and 1970s, often playing tough, working-class women. Parhami says she was the first woman in Iran to write and direct a dramatic feature before the 1979 revolution. In March 1980 she tried to film a documentary on the hijab at a women's demonstration, and was arrested and imprisoned for almost a year. Like many entertainers, she was then banned from film and television.

Parhami says that once she was in Tehran she had a nervous breakdown and became a wandering homeless woman in the city. He connects this to the memories and the noisy urban environment of the city, which he says had a strong effect on her mind, and to a difficult family background in her past. The interview gives no dates or duration. Parhami adds that about two years earlier he had read an online Persian article calling her the most famous homeless woman in Iran, a claim he did not verify.

She now lives in a village, Malak-Abad, in south-central Iran, with no internet or social media. Parhami describes her moving from the forests of the north to the deserts of the south. In recent years she has written poetry and novels, and he hopes she can publish them and receive support for a more comfortable old age.