Niki Karimi (Actress and Director )

She was one of the earliest stars of post-revolutionary cinema. She achieved a lofty place in the Iranian cinema after her appearance in The Bride (Behrouz Afkhami), which was her second movie and has managed to keep that status up to now. The Bride was made in 1991. Before that, many women like Susan Taslimi, Afsaneh Baygan, Mahshid Afsharzadeh and Golchehreh Sajjadiyeh had become famous, but none of them could draw people to theaters to see a films and their popularity did not last. After appearing in The Bride, which was a commercial film, she was intelligent enough to pick her next roles with more tact to prove her prowess. This happened later and she earned a lot of credit after appearing in two films made by the prominent Iranian director, Dariush Mehrjui. Sara and Pari were two subsequent films which made her famous as a true actress, not just a star. She spent the first decade of her career like this and achieved a right balance in her work, which has made her a lasting figure of the Iranian cinema. Although policies adopted by Khatami government paved the way for the appearance of other female stars like Hedyeh Tehrani, Niki Karimi has remained popular. Ten years after her debut, Tahmineh Milani's Two Women brought her to the fore again. She appeared in the next two films of Milani and was brought to life again. The second stage of her career has been marked by efforts at filmmaking. Karimi has made two films. Though they have not satisfied the critics, her films have helped her earn new credit as a director who is more inclined toward making different films. When her first film was not publicly screened last year, she wrote a letter of protest to the highest cinema authorities and called for public screening of her film. However, it was later known that the main problem was with distributor of the film and censorship had no role. During this year's edition of International Fajr Film Festival, she has appeared in two commercial films, that is, The Second Wife (Sirous Alvand) and The Hidden Feeling (Mostafa Razzaq Karimi). She has also appeared in Shahram Shah-Hosseini's Women Are Angels. Producer of that film has never sent his films to Fajr Festival because due to commercial nature of those films, they never stand a chance of winning prizes.