Iranian Influential Women: Manijeh Hekmat (1962-Present)

Movie actress, director and producer Manijeh Hekmat was born in the city of Arak in 1962 and started out in the film business when she was only 15. She entered the film industry at the lowest level, never rejected any job, and rose step by step to become a successful woman in Iranian cinema.

In 1987, Hekmat was the script supervisor on the movie A House Like a City, directed by Hojatollah Seifi, and the following year she played a role in Apartment No. 13 by Yadollah Samadi. In 1993, she was the assistant director on Hassan Hedayat’s film Knights of Delgosha Alley. Then, in 2001, she made her first feature-length film, Women’s Prison, which was acclaimed internationally.

“I am a producer and in most of the world production is a man’s job,” she says. “But I did not feel it this way. Perhaps I fought hard. It took me 30 years to become a producer and a director while many in Iran become producers and directors in two years. And, whenever the Ministry of Culture has a new director-general, 40 to 50 new directors and producers are added to this crowd. Thirty years is not a short time and it has its own particular problems.”

For the first time in Iranian cinema, Women’s Prison dealt with sensitive issues such as crime, corruption, prostitution, drug addiction, homosexuality and political prisoners. The film quickly attracted the attention of Iranian and foreign critics and received many awards and nominations, including the 2002 Best Film and Best Script at Iran’s House of Cinema Festival. In 2003, it received Special Mention at the Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland.

The film was also nominated in the New Directors Competition at the 2002 Chicago International Film Festival and for the best film awards at festivals in Bratislava (Slovakia), Gijon (Spain) and Hawaii.

Manijeh Hekmat’s second feature film, Three Women (2008) tells the story of three women belonging to different generations who ar eliving in the past, the present and the future. The movie was a box office success in Iran and won the Best Film award at the Amiens International Film Festival in France.

The production of the next film, Lullaby, started in 2008. For this project, a research team traveled to Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to gather and record Persian-language lullabies.

In 2011, Hekmat produced No Men Allowed, a film directed by Rambod Javan in which her daughter Pegah Ahangarani, also a director, acted. In 2020, she directed Bandar Band, a road movie that follows a band's day-long journey across a flooded landscape to Tehran. The movie was a joint production by the Tehran-based production company Bamdad Film and studio kapFilme in Berlin.

Manijeh Hekmat has never been a silent observer of social and political events in Iran. “I believe that if a filmmaker does not care about social dissonance he is neither a filmmaker nor an artist,” she says.

On February 25 of 2023, after her public support for the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, Hekmat announced she had been banned from leaving the country, from working and from engaging in financial dealings: “On top of that, I’m sick and have undergone 3 operations…Will the [authorities] do me a favor and pay my rent and expenses because I’ve reached the end of my rope.”