 Kimiaee
was particularly bewildered by the public's cold reception of his
film. Other directs of his generations seemed to have found
their proper course, while a new generation ahd also entered upon
the scene. Kimiaee next tried his hand at a political theme
relating to history. The Lead (1989) recounted
the adventures of a journalist at the time of Musaddeq's struggles
for the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. Once
again Kimiaee seemed to have been preoccupied with too many themes,
and as a result The Lead, which was about the
immigration of Iranian Jews to the "Promised Land", satisfied
neither the public no the critics. And once again Kimiaee had
to pay a heavy price for his misplace overconfidence in his
popularity with moviegoers. Under the circumstances, the only
solution seemed to be a return to his popular cinema of the past
which had lasted for almost a decade. Thus in his next picture
Snake Fang (1990) Kimiaee dealt with a topical social
problem on the war refugee population in Tehran. The film
enjoyed moderate success at the Fajr Film Festival and at box
ofrice. It was screened at several international festivals and
was aired by the German (ZDF) television network.
Kimiaee, who by now had
apparently discovered the type of popular cinmea which he could
make, chose the fate of an exhausted Iranian veteran for his
next picture, the Sergeant (1991). Returning
home after 8 years in the battlefield and invalided out, the
Sergeant finds his Russian émigré wife is preparing to return to
Russia after the fall of the Soviet regime, and that his land
has been unlawfully possessed by a local dealer. The
sergeant thus is forced to fight another war at home front, to
keep together his disintegrating family, which is a recurrent
motif in Kimiaee's pictures. Stylistically The
Sergeant is an exception among Kimiaee's films. It
is characterized by an introspective mood and slow rhythm, which
he followed in his next picture.
Wolf Trace
(1994) reflects more than any other of Kimiaee's pictures, the
director's fondness for the western genre involving the theme of
personal revenge. An innocent young man, who has unjustly
served term for many years, returns to Tehran to avenge himself
on the person who was responsible for his imprisonment.
And finally in 1994
Kimiaee managed to realize his cherished dream of shooting a
film in Europe. The Trade, shot in Germany with a
principally Iranian cast and crew, tells the story of an Iranian
expatriate who has divorced his wife and is  returning
home form America. He stops over in Cologne to take his
son along with him. Originally reluctant to go along with
his father, the son changes his mind when his father's briefcase
is stolen by hoodlums.
Thus, Kimiaee has
returned in his latest picture to the theme of responsibility
towards family, and by a metaphoric extention towards the
homeland, which he had tackled in a more tragic framework in his
second picture, Ghaissar.
At the threshold of old
age, Kimiaee has 21 feature and two short films to his credit.
His impact on the Iranian cinema, specially in his won formative
years, has been remarkable. With Ghaissar many of the
element of the popular cinema, such as film poster, musical
score, set designing, makeup, etc. were raised to a much higher
level, and it would be no exaggeration state that Ghaissar was a
decisive turning point in the Iranian cinema. Kimiaee
undoubtedly deserved a prominent place in the history of cinema
in Iran.
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