By this time Kiarostami was a known and fairly successful film-maker, but his reception in Europe suddenly placed him next to Vittorio De Sica of Bicycle Thieves (1948), Yasujirō Ozu of Tokyo Story (1953) and Satyajit Ray of The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) and gave his work global power and significance. The following decade, Jafar Panahi won international critical acclaim when his film The Circle (1999) premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
In the process, no doubt, some of the best films never received the attention they richly deserved. Among its older masters, the cinema of Farrokh Ghaffari, Ebrahim Golestan, and Bahman Farmanara are chief among such oversights. There has also benefitted from some gifted women film-makers like Rakhshān Banietemad, Marziyeh Meshkini, and Manijeh Hekmat, who too have not received their dues.
