Iranian New Wave of Persian cinema, Iran has produced record numbers of film school graduates; each year more than 20 new directors, many of them women, make their debut films. In the last two decades, the percentage of Iranian film directors who are women has exceeded the percentage of women film directors in most Western countries. The success of the pioneering director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad suggests that many women directors in Iran were working hard on films long before director Samira Makhmalbaf made the headlines. Internationally recognized figures in Persian women's cinema are Tahmineh Milani, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Zahra Dowlatabadi, Niki Karimi, Samira Makhmalbaf, Mahin Oskouei, Pari Saberi, Hana Makhmalbaf, Pouran Rakhshandeh, Shirin Neshat, Sepideh Farsi, Maryam Keshavarz, Yassamin Maleknasr, and Sara Rastegar. Iranian writer-director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is probably Iran's best known and certainly most prolific female filmmaker. She has established herself as the elder stateswoman of Iranian cinema with documentaries and films about social pathology. One of the best-known female film directors in the country today is Samira Makhmalbaf, who directed her first film, The Apple when she was only 17 years old. Samira Makhmalbaf won the 2000 Cannes Jury Prize for Blackboards, a film about the trials of two traveling teachers in Kurdistan. In Persian literature one can find references to women as far back as Pre-Islamic times. And many creators of classical verse and prose were women themselves as well. One can mention Qatran Tabrizi, Rabia Balkhi, Táhirih, Simin Behbahani, Simin Daneshvar, Parvin E'tesami, Forough Farrokhzad, Mahsati and Mina Assadi in this group to name nine of them. Western perceptions of Iranian women In Western democracies, there is a general view of women in modern Iran and the Islamic World writ large as victims of a patriarchal system that oppresses and enslaves them. Such a perspective was criticized by Ayatollah Khomeini, who argued: Also, negative perceptions about foreign women are common inside Iran, where American and Western women are frequently seen as "commodified" objects of male desire. See also Andaruni Women's rights in Iran Iranian women's movement List of Iranian women List of Iranian women artists References women and politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling. Hamideh Sedghi, “Women and Politics in Iran”, New York: published 2007 ^Higher Education of women in Iran: Progress or Problem Heshmat Sadat Moinifar. “Higher Education of Women in Iran: Progress or Problem?”. International Journal of Women's Research,1,1,2012, 43-60 Further reading Persian Women &