Iran's new President has a habit of popping up in unexpected places. Mr Mohamed Khatami has boarded Tehran buses to talk to passengers, and stops to listen to complaints in bread queues.
A few evenings ago, he arrived unannounced at a meeting of actors and film directors to praise their "pioneering role" in Iranian culture.
During the revolution, hundreds of movie theatres were sacked by Islamists opposed to the sex films and cheap musicals produced under the Shah.
Iranian directors credit the relative freedom of Mr Khatami's 1982/92 reign at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (which controls the film industry) for the post-revolution flowering of Iranian cinema.
It has not been easy. In the words of Abbas Kiarostami, the most famous director, the Iranian film industry is "a miracle".
The country's 200 directors are often victims of the tug-of-war between Islamic conservatives and moderates.
Their films are banned and unbanned, then banned again. Although screenplays must be approved by the ministry before production, finished works are reviewed and often disqualified on the grounds of "un-Islamic content". Despite restrictions, Iranian films are entered at virtually every foreign film festival, and have won dozens of awards.
Mr Kiarostami's The Taste of the Cherry won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival. Because it deals with the taboo subject of suicide, which is forbidden by Islam, it has received only one unofficial showing in Iran. The Ministry of Culture withheld the export licence for the film so long that the reels arrived in Cannes after the festival started. When Catherine Deneuve congratulated Mr Kiarostami by kissing him on both cheeks, Iranian fundamentalists were outraged.
On his return to Tehran, he had to sneak out of the airport through a side-door to avoid the militant conservatives who threatened to beat him up.
One of Mr Khatami's first moves after taking office in August was to put a film director, Mr Seifollah Dad, in charge of filmlicensing. The appointment gave heart to discouraged directors; Mr Dad's 1995 film, The Lone Survivor, about Palestinians in Lebanon, was the first film with unveiled women allowed to be shown in Iranian cinemas, on the grounds that it was made outside the country and that the women were foreign.
Mr Dad and his superior, the new Minister of Culture, Mr Ataollah Mohajerani, are already starting to make a difference. The most popular film in Tehran at the moment is Davoud Mir Bagheri's long-banned Snowman, about an Iranian who flees to Turkey, disguises himself a as woman and marries an American in the vain hope of going to the US.
After waiting four years, Tahmineh Milani, one of a half-dozen woman directors, now working in Iran, has just received permission to make her fifth feature film, Two Women, and hopes to begin shooting next spring.
The film's admission that social injustice continued after the revolution was unacceptable to government censors until Mr Khatami came to power.
"There is a very good feeling among people in the industry," Mrs Milani says. "That idea that things are going to change is very valuable. They have gotten rid of a few conservative people in the ministry who were holding everyone back."
But Mrs Milani and her colleagues still fear a conservative backlash. They cringe when they recall the brief rule of Mr Ezatollah Zarghami, a former Revolutionary Guard who held Mr Dad's position in 1996.
Mr Zarghami published a detailed rule-book for film-makers. Every movie had to have a prayer scene and practically everything else was forbidden: close-ups of women's faces, negative bearded characters (the beard is a sign of Islamic devotion), foreign or "joyous" music, close-fitting clothes on women, the showing of any part of a woman other than her face or hands, neckties (signs of Western decadence), unless worn by a "bad" character, swear-words and foreign terms, any physical contact between men and women - even the tips of their fingers.
"We still don't know exactly what we can do, " Mrs Milani says. "You start making the film now, with the present mentality and regulations, but you have no idea what the mood will be like or who will be in charge a year from now when it is shown."