Iran is a country with around 75 million people. However, the Islamic Republic has a number of religious minorities, including Christians, Jews and Zoarastrians. One minority, numbering around 300,000, has been singled out and persecuted at great length since the 1979 revolution.

On Sunday, January 15, at the 69th Golden Globes, “A Separation” by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi won the award for Best Foreign Language Film. Already a winner in various international film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival, Asia Pacific Screen Awards, and New York Film Critics Circle, the film’s success at the Golden Globes did not necessarily come as a surprise to either its Western or Iranian audiences alike.

In the ever-growing canon of Iranian filmmaking, one name unmistakably stands out: Abbas Kiarostami. Since staking out his reputation as an internationally acclaimed director and screenwriter, his films, though deceptively simple in structure, have become famous for taking on complex issues: the legitimacy of suicide in Taste of Cherry; gender equality in The Wind Will Carry Us; Iran’s socio-political landscape as seen through the eyes of one woman in Ten; and most recently, relationship drama Certified Copy, his second film shot and produced outside of Iran.

With Norway still recovering from the devastating terrorist attack by Christian fundamentalist Anders Behring Breivik last July, a new Norwegian television series called Taxi claims to challenge the established prejudices surrounding how ethnic minorities and “native” Norwegians interact. Unfortunately, anyone who expected that to actually be the premise of the show would have found it disappointing at best and, at worst, detrimental to any further dialogue and understanding.

Recently, special screening of Iran’s official entry to the American Academy Awards was shown at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. The film, “A Separation,” is an emotionally riveting drama produced, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. It will premiere in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on December 30.

Rarely do Americans see a side of Pakistan - a nation that plays an integral part in the United States’ “war on terror” - apart from the slew of sensational images broadcast on mainstream media. The most frequently recurring image is that of a nation plagued by violence and poverty.