In recent years, the large body of scholarship on women in Iranian cinema have, for the most part, focused on the ‘representations’ of women in (pre-revolutionary and/or post-revolutionary) Iranian cinema. Those works that have engaged with the role of women as filmmakers within Iran’s film industry have mainly centered on the rise of women filmmakers in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema as an unprecedented historical phenomenon that seems at odds with the gender hierarchies of Iranian society and the sexual politics of Iran’s Islamic state. Regardless of the scarcity of historical information and archival materials as well as the low numbers of women filmmakers prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution—only 3 women directed fiction, feature films: Shahla Riahi, Marva Nabili, and Kobra Saidi (aka. Shahrzad)—comprehensive historical studies on these early women filmmakers and their works seem crucial for understanding both the female subjectivity in pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema in regard to tensions and negotiations of gender roles in filmic production, and the gender structures in today’s Iranian cinema as a response to this historical past. By focusing on the cinematic career of Shahla Riahi, the first Iranian woman filmmaker and a popular actress, and in particular, on the production and reception of her first and only film "Marjan" (1956), I provide a historical, gender, and socio-cultural analysis of her contributions to the Iranian cinema and society against various historical narratives and historiographic approaches that have overlooked her and her work(s). I further point to Riahi’s presence in cinema as an actress from the 1950s to the early 2000s as a reflection of the continuity of Iranian female subjectivity in this medium, which necessitates a historiographic reconfiguration and a historical re-reading of Iranian cinema regarding the role of women. As Annett Kuhn and Jackie Stacey assert, “[R]ather than being simply ‘about the past’ in any straightforward way, screen histories are of necessity concerned with past-present relations with a view to the future” (1998, 9). By historically analyzing the gender dynamics of Iranian cinema and the influences of Shahla Riahi, I reframe the historical filmic narratives on this figure and connect them to the strong presence of women in contemporary Iranian cinema and society. I thus argue that the legacy of Shahla Riahi in today’s Iranian cinema resonates in the professional career of popular actresses, such as Niki Karimi, who have become prominent filmmakers as well.