IRANIAN cinema has long enjoyed a high reputation for films of social realism, poignancy and artistry, despite strict political and religious censorship.

Generations of Iranian directors have developed innovative cinematic devices and mise-en-scene to work out narratives within the modesty rules, which prohibit scenes of unveiled woman and heterosexual contacts.

For example, some directors will show a woman about to remove the burka or veil, then moving outside of the frame, implying that she has removed it, without breaking the rules.

Given the censorship and gender inequality in Iranian society, one would expect there to be few women filmmakers and expect those few to struggle. Quite the contrary, Iran is reported to have a record-breaking number of female film school graduates today and a higher percentage of women directors than Western countries.

Many of these brave women followed in the footsteps of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, the country's foremost woman director of feature films. She was the first woman to win Best Director in Iran's 1991 Fajr Film Festival for her ground-breaking drama "Nargess" about a love triangle. She was also the first woman in Iranian cinema to win an important prize in Iran for feature films.

"I'm very happy to see many more Iranian women working in film today. A lot of women are working on short films and documentaries. Some have also become professional and are making feature films," the 58-year-old director told Shanghai Daily.

Bani-Etemad is a jury member in Shanghai International Film Festival, which concludes tonight, viewing and evaluating 17 films for various awards together with other members.

Iranian cinema won even more international fans and attention when the 2011 drama "A Separation" won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. At the current Shanghai film festival, the Iranian film "Bear" is in competition for the Golden Goblet and four other Iranian films have been screened.

"A Separation," budgeted at only US$800,000, defeated dozens of competitors from all over the world, including the US$94 million-budgeted "The Flowers of War" by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

Its success has drawn the attention of Chinese movie fans and some in the film industry who ask, why is it that Iranians can make such excellent, broadly appealing movies despite censorship, while many Chinese directors cannot do so in spite of less severe restrictions?

"Iranian film directors, in general, have tried very hard to depict the society and its underlying social economic problems, despite of the censorship. The films are about Iranian society, but also discuss universal and global issues with a philosophical approach," Bani-Etemad said.

She is known for her continuous struggle with censorship since the very beginning when she was told to cut a major scene from "Nargess," a drama featuring a love triangle. It involves a male thief who is disowned by his family, his love interest Nargess, and his older former lover who proposes to pretend to be his mother and support his proposal to Nargess - on the condition that they continue their liaison.

"That was the last time I cut a major scene from my films. I was young but I told myself I would never do that again," the director said.

"And I never did again."

Instead, she tried very hard to have a dialogue with censors and explain her intentions. The writer/director, who usually writes her own scripts, also found ways to express her own ideas while still getting censors' approval.

"It's like a labyrinth and you just have to find the right way out," she said.

She succeeded but the way has been difficult and tiring. Her last film, titled "Tales," has not been approved by censors. The finished film, neither political nor radical, lies in a drawer.

"I'm working on a script for my next movie and I want to make it outside Iran," she said.

That doesn't mean the film would be political or radical in any way, she emphasized.

"We Are Half of Iran's Population"

This is the title of Bani-Etemad's 2009 documentary that highlights the issue of women's rights in Iran and features interviews with women activists. One of them faced the camera and asked, "For whom are you making this film?"

This question, in variations, recurs in many of her documentaries and feature films. She first heard the question from a poor woman in one of her early documentary works and came to ponder the issues behind it.

"Nobody listens to them and nobody pays attention to them, these poor women, and yet they are the ones who need the most concern," she said.

"So I keep asking myself the question, for whom do I shoot the film? And unfortunately, I still don't know the answer."

In the Iranian presidential election in 2001, more than 700 people registered to run as candidates but only four were accepted, all males.

What intrigued Bani-Etemad was that more than 100 women registered to run and most were marginalized people from the poorest families. Through interviews with them, she made the documentary "Our Times," (2002) which followed one of them, a single mother living with her blind mother and young daughter.

"I was very interested in finding out who they are and why they want to run. It's so intriguing that most of them belong to poor families, and they don't have the chance to talk about their problems. So they want to run for president to get the chance," the director said.

The single mother is chosen as a symbol of these women, of whom society has little time or compassion.

"It (running) is like her little fantasy to keep her going, while in reality, she can't even find a new home since she is a single mother," Bani-Etemad explained.

"Women can never be presidential candidates in reality because the rules say so."

In both documentaries and feature films, Bani-Etemad focuses on social and economic problems in Iranian society, particularly issues affecting women, poor women especially. Her films also feature strong female characters and protagonists.

Yet, she doesn't like being identified as a female or feminist filmmaker. She prefers to be called a filmmaker who is a woman and who focuses her lens on women, especially women from the lower classes.

When she pitched her first feature film "Off Limits" (1987) to producers, she waited a very long time for answers. She held a degree in film from the College of Dramatic Arts in Tehran, had made documentaries for Iranian television and worked on professional film projects. It was an unwritten rule that if someone had one of these three credentials, he or she could turn professional in feature films.

"I had all three, yet I had no answers for a very long time," she recalled. "I think they were simply shocked that a woman was doing this. At the time, in feature film, it was nearly all men."

Her family neither supported nor opposed her decisions to break into this new world. Her mother wanted her to become a teacher, and to this day still believes it would have been better had she gone into education, after seeing the hurdles her daughter had to overcome in the film industry.

"I'm very happy to see that society and families are so much more supportive of women directors today," Bani-Etemad said. "We also have more intellectual women in art, in literature and in science. They don't get recognized equally alongside men, but you just have to keep trying to fight and find your place."