Shahrzad is the pseudonym of the early 60s popular Iranian cinema actress, poet, writer and filmmaker, Kobra Amin-Saidi.

Having appeared in more than fifty feature films, 80% in which she had major roles, Shahrzad saw her fortunes plummet dramatically after the revolution.

Like many artists in the entertainment industry, Shahrzad was banned from the silver screen and TV. Shahrzaad was also a published poet and a filmmaker.

In fact, she was the first female filmmaker in Iran who wrote and directed a dramatic feature film, Mariam & Mani (1978), before the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Though many artists chose to leave the country or to stay and adopt a new lifestyle or career in the newborn Islamic Republic, Shahrzad belongs to neither of these groups. As she puts it herself, "I was consumed by an overwhelming sense of fear and insecurity."

She suffered a nervous breakdown and lost touch with friends and family. Today she is in her late-sixties, and after more than 30 years of being out of work Shahrzad is a wandering homeless woman in search of food and shelter.

In the last two decades she has sought very basic means of survival in the forests of Northern Iran where she lived for three years, or in southern provincial towns and villages where the cost of living is cheaper than in metropolitan Tehran. According to an online report, she was living in abandoned buildings there for the last few years, occasionally working as a vendor, selling books on sidewalks, or as caretaker or cleaning lady.

She started dancing at the Lalezar Street cafes as Kobra Amin-Saidi from a young age, and then in 1969, under the pseudonym Shahrzad, she played the dancer Soheila Ferdous in Masoud Kimiai's popular movie "Qaiser".

At first, she played small roles (mostly female dancers or villains) in the cinema, and gradually she played influential roles in films such as "Tangna" and "The Morning of the Fourth Day", which won an award at the Sepas Film Festival.

Around 1973, Shahrzad quit acting in protest against the prevailing atmosphere in Iranian films and became a member of Azad Cinema Group and started making short films. At the same time, she published her poems, and her short stories were published in magazines such as Ayandegan newspaper and Ketab-e Jommeh.

Her collection of poems, titled "We grow old with thirst", was published in 2,000 copies by Eshraghi Publishing House. Amir Naderi, the famous film photographer of those days and the famous director of the following years, also designed and photographed the cover of the book.

In 1977, Shahrzad made her first (and last) feature film called "Maryam and Mani" with Pouri Banai's acting and investment. This is one of the few films in Iranian cinema before the revolution in which the protagonist, writer and director are women. But the movie was banned in that year and it was successfully released in 1980.

After that, there was no news of Shahrazad, so they thought he was dead. In fact, during the 1979 revolution, Shahrzad Saeedi lost all her possessions, even her books and films. She went to Germany in 1985 and returned to Iran seven years later and lived in different cities with financial problems.

The documentary film "Shahrzad's Tale" (2015) by Shahin Parhami is a film that tells the story of a lost era and a forgotten star of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, a tale of a working class woman who against all the odds struggled and succeeded to become an icon in the mainstream popular culture of the 1960s-70s Iran. It is also the story of ‘Film Farsi’, a popular genre of Iranian cinema that has been neglected by the media, film critics and film historians. Following the Revolution of 1979, the film industry and its star-oriented culture was seen as a decadent, un-Islamic, westernized, amoral and corrupted form of entertainment.