Golshifteh Farahani is the biggest female film star to come out of Iran but she isn’t in any rush to return home.

With the amount of walkie-talkies, clipboards and fierce-looking faces charging up and down, you’d think red carpet events were micro-managed down to the last flash of celebrity teeth.

But at Abu Dhabi’s Middle Eastern International Film Festival, it seems, things were a bit more on the casual side. So casual, that some stars weren’t even provided with a schedule. “What? Red Carpet? Really?”

Golshifteh Farahani’s latest film, About Elly, is about to be shown at the Emirates Palace, but I appear to be the first to tell the award-winning Iranian actress that – according to the timetable – she’s due on the red carpet beforehand. As the phone goes down, I immediately imagine a wild hands-aloft panic in the hotel room as suitcases are torn apart trying to find something suitable to wear and makeup hurriedly applied.

If this were indeed the case, it’s not apparent some 20 minutes later. The tall 26-year-old, accompanied by her impressively beardy director husband Amin, casually glides past the cameras like a pro. Elegantly dressed in a shimmering silk suit, offset with a pair of rather colourful heels, Golshifteh appears as if she’s done this many times before. And of course, she has.

About Elly, which sees Golshifteh play cupid in a tale of relationships and tragedy in Middle Class Iran, has been doing the festival circuit for several months, picking up various awards on the way. Most notable were the Silver Bear for Best Director at 2009’s Berlin Film Festival and Best Picture at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. But for Golshifteh, the film has greater poignancy, as it may be her last acting experience in Iran.

“It’s funny, because inside Iran, as an artist you’re automatically part of the opposition, and outside of Iran I was the ‘axis of evil’.”

Before her appearance in 2008’s Body of Lies, Golshifteh was already major name in her homeland, with 18 films under her belt. But it was Ridley’s Scott’s thriller about Middle Eastern terrorism and espionage – in which she played a Jordanian nurse to Leonardo DiCaprio’s CIA spy – that threw her onto the international stage. It also made her the first Iranian to star in a major Hollywood picture since the 1979 revolution, and as such a rather controversial figure, especially given the film’s delicate subject matter. And it very nearly didn’t happen.

“They couldn’t actually hire me at the beginning because I was Iranian, because of the US trade embargo,” she tells me after the screening (which, by the way, passed without any other organisational blunders). “It’s funny, because inside Iran, as an artist you’re automatically part of the opposition, and outside of Iran I was the ‘axis of evil’.” Thankfully, Golshifteh was saved from this seemingly lose-lose scenario by Ridley Scott, whose lawyers found a loophole by sorting her contract via London rather than the US. “If it wasn’t for him, it wouldn’t have happened.”

But the drama really unfolded once Body of Lies was completed. She was banned from leaving Iran in February 2008, a move that saw her miss an audition to play alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia (a role that eventually went to the distinctly un-Persian Gemma Arterton). Eventually she managed to sweet talk the Iranian authorities into letting her attend the October premier of Body of Lies in New York. “I was allowed to go, but with some chains,” she smiles. She never returned home.

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