Mirza Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi

Mirza Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi (; c. 1855–1922), sometimes written as Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi-e Tehrani, was a pioneering Iranian photographer, cinematographer, and the first commercial film exhibitor in Iran. Although the French Catholic mission had opened the first public cinema, Soleil Cinema, in Tabriz, in 1900, Sahhafbashi opened the first commercial movie house in Tehran in November 1904. Sahhafbashi also employed a lecturer to explain to the unaccustomed audiences what was on the screen. Along with Mehdi Qoli Hedayat (who traveled to Japan in 1904, seven years after Sahhafbashi), he was one of the first Iranians to write an individual travelogue based on firsthand experiences in East Asia. His itinerary began on 12 May 1896, traveling from Tehran across the Caspian Sea to the port of Anzali by steamship, then a train to Moscow and from thereon to Berlin. From Berlin, he traveled widely across Europe, including London and Paris; across the Atlantic to New York City, Niagara Falls, and Canada. He then crossed the North American continent by rail and ended in Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia. From there, he crossed the Pacific to the Japanese port of Yokohama. In addition to the kinetoscope, he also brought a cinematograph from London back to Iran and provided a Persian-language description for the machine.

In 1904, only nine years after the first movie screening in Europe by the Lumiere brothers, Sahhafbashi opened the first public movie theater in Tehran in the backyard of his antique shop on Cheragh Gaz Avenue. The movie house showed comedies, trick films, Russian documentaries, and newsreels from the First Boer War in South Africa. Within a month, it was banned by the cleric Fazlullah Nouri, possibly because it opened during the holy month of Ramadan. Within this month, the twelve-year old Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh, one of the most prominent writers in Iran in the 20th century, saw his first film.

Political activities Sahhafbashi, like other early pioneers of Iranian cinema, was a constitutionalist and supported the replacement of the despotic monarchy with a parliamentary monarchy. During the Persian Constitutional Revolution in 1909, he joined a secret society that advocated for progressive reforms; in one of the group's meetings, he encouraged members to wear black clothing as a show of mourning for "our mother country, [which] is in the throes of death".

Sahhafbashi's son, Abolghasem Rezai, founded a documentary and dubbing studio with Esfandiar Bozorgmehr and an American rug merchant, Stephen H. Nyman, who was also a representative for 20th Century Fox.