Investigating Sexism Perspectives in Iranian Filmmakers Tahmineh Milani and Asghar Farhadi from the Social Semiotics Point of View

In this paper, a number of films by two Iranian filmmakers as part of the linguistic corpus was analysed based on van Leeuwen's social semiotics. The attempt has been  to answer the questions, "what are the common and different elements of signs of sexism thought in Iranian cinematic texts based on the semiotics of language", and "how have these signs been able to indicate the centrality of sexism and socialism in the Iranian society?" The present study uses a descriptive-analytic method. Having a quantitative as well as a  qualitative study, the paper uses purposeful sampling to examine the modalities in films. Findings of the study showed unexpected results based on van Leeuwen's  model in the number of modalities used by female and male characters in Iranian female director films with a feminist perspective. A similar study was conducted on Iranian male director, and the results showed that the modalities used by male and female characters yielded the full-fledged expectation of Van Leeuwen's pattern with no dominant orientation between the two sexes, and the female and male characters in the film's story naturally used the expected modalities of the pattern used.