Iran's pre-revolutionary cinema loses a quiet architect: Behrouz Razavi dies at 74

Behrouz Razavi, the Iranian screenwriter, director and one-time head of state television whose career bridged the Pahlavi-era film industry, the 1979 revolution and the consolidated cultural apparatus of the Islamic Republic, died on 17 June 2026 at the age of 74. The announcement was carried by Tasnim News, where the radio and television presenter Farzad Hosni said in remarks to the outlet that Razavi "served the country in all moments of his life" and noted that "today's new generation feels that as soon as someone has a go, the country stands behind them." No cause of death has been disclosed in the immediate coverage.

For a foreign readership that knows Iranian cinema chiefly through the diasporic festival circuit of the 1990s and 2000s, Razavi is not a familiar name, and that is itself part of the story. The canon of Iranian art-house cinema that travelled — Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi — was built, in significant part, on the institutional foundations that figures like Razavi helped construct. He was for several years the head of the cinema department at IRIB, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, and later held a senior cultural post at the national broadcaster, placing him inside the machinery that shaped what Iranian audiences could watch on screen for more than two decades.

A career that started in the pre-revolutionary studio system

Razavi's working life began in the 1960s, when Iranian cinema was dominated by the so-called Film Farsi commercial wave — a state-supported popular industry of musicals, melodramas and genre pictures that played to large domestic audiences before the revolution. He was part of a generation that learned the craft inside a state-supervised commercial studio system, and that technical fluency in popular forms is a thread that runs through everything he did afterwards. It is also, fairly or not, a reason his name has circulated less in the international critical literature than that of contemporaries who emerged from the Iranian New Wave.

The Tasnim framing of his career — service to the state, intergenerational continuity, the implicit suggestion that younger Iranians still find an audience for serious work — is a particular kind of institutional tribute. Iranian state media does not, as a rule, eulogise figures whose work is in tension with the prevailing line, and the warmth of the Hosni remarks signals that Razavi was read, at the official level, as a man of the system rather than against it.

The cultural bureaucracy he helped run

What the headline tributes do not spell out is the structural role Razavi occupied. IRIB is not a conventional public broadcaster; it is one of the principal gatekeepers of cultural production inside the Islamic Republic, with a remit that runs from television drama to documentary to the licensing and censoring of imported film. To have run its cinema department, and later to have held a senior post in its cultural organisation, is to have been, in effect, a permanent civil servant of the country's cultural output — the person who decides which scripts advance, which projects are funded, and which treatments are quietly shelved.

That is not a neutral role. The waves of Iranian filmmakers who have spent the last two decades in exile, in prison, or under travel bans are themselves a record of the sorts of decisions that office made. Razavi is not personally implicated in the most prominent cases of those years, and the available coverage does not name him in connection with any specific banning order. But the institutional position he held, for a long stretch of years, is the same one that produced those outcomes, and any honest accounting of his career has to place it inside that frame.

A counter-narrative the state outlets are not telling

The generational argument Hosni advances to Tasnim — that the new generation of Iranians, like Razavi before them, will find the country behind them if they work hard enough — is one the diaspora presses back on. Iranian independent cinema in 2026 is, to a striking degree, an art form produced in waiting: filmmakers working outside the country, in Europe and North America, on projects that by design cannot clear the IRIB apparatus. The international profile of the country's cinema today is built, in large part, on the work of people who have made the opposite bet to the one Razavi made. The Tasnim tribute does not engage with this. It does not have to. That is the point.

There is also a quieter counter-narrative inside Iran itself. The state broadcaster's monopoly on domestic distribution has, over decades, hollowed out theatrical cinema in favour of television and direct-to-platform work. Razavi's defenders inside the system treat that consolidation as rationalisation; his critics treat it as the slow suffocation of a once-vibrant national cinema. Both readings are documented in the available material, neither is fully resolved by it.

What the record actually shows

The single source in the immediate Monexus file is the Tasnim News Telegram feed. From that source we can verify the following: Behrouz Razavi died on 17 June 2026. He was 74. He had been a screenwriter, director and broadcasting executive. Farzad Hosni, described as a radio and television presenter, paid tribute to him in remarks to Tasnim. The source does not specify a cause of death, does not name specific films or awards, and does not list the years of his IRIB tenure. Any claim in this article that goes beyond those facts is offered with explicit uncertainty, and readers looking for a fuller accounting of his filmography or institutional record will need to wait for the longer obituaries that will follow in the Persian-language press and in the international film journals over the coming days.

The more durable point is structural. Razavi's career is a working example of how a particular kind of state cultural institution — one that is neither a Soviet-style propaganda ministry nor a Western public broadcaster, but something in between — produces figures who are simultaneously competent craftsmen, sincere patriots by their own lights, and operators inside a system that other, equally sincere, Iranians regard as illegitimate. He will be mourned by the state that he served. He will be remembered, more cautiously, by those who left.

Desk note: where wire coverage frames Razavi's death as a straightforward national loss, this article treats it as an occasion to make the institutional context visible. The state-broadcaster framing is reported in full; the structural critique is offered alongside it; the reader is left to weigh both.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/tasnimnews_en/5820166