After the Revolution
After the Revolution in 1979, Khoshkam had to choose a new identity for herself because of the country's new reality and thus changed her name to Zahra Hatami in accordance with her husband's last name. In this regard, Basir Nasibi wrote an article about the effects of the Islamic Revolution on actresses' lives as they had been before the Revolution, which he wrote on 20 November 2006 in Saarbrücken, Germany, on the sidelines of Shohreh Aghdashloo's interview with the BBC:
... the Revolution caused actresses to hide under their husbands' names, if they had husbands and, for example, Zari Khoshkam, a reckless actress of the professional Iranian cinema, turned into a housewife, Zahra Hatami, until the committees gave up on her!...
In the years after the Revolution, playing in some episodes of the television series Hezar Dastan was one of the few games she played in the years that followed. In this series, she played the role of Amina Aghdas, the bride of Noorchasmi Khan Muzaffar (played by Ezzatullah Tzamami), who merges time and earth to find a piece of her lost jewels. But parts of his play were removed during the broadcast, and finally it was officially banned at the same time as the wave of bans on actors' work from before the Revolution. Later, in 1999, Varuzh Karim-Masihi produced a film called Tehran Roozer No by reassembling parts of the series Hezar Dastan, which also featured Zahra Hatami.
Of course, Khoshkam (Hatami) was supposed to appear again in her husband's productions, but Ali Hatami eventually died of cancer after 25 years of married life with her in December 1996. In the same year, their only daughter, Leila Hatami, who after playing small roles in her father's films, had gone to Lausanne, Switzerland for higher education, returned to Iran because of her father's illness, and while acting in the film Leila by Dariush Mehrjui, married her opposite actor, Ali Mosaffa. Mosaffa is the son of Mozaher Mosaffa, a poet, writer and university professor, and his mother, Amir Banoo Karimi, was the daughter of Professor Seyed Karim Amiri Firuzkuhi, an Iranian poet and writer.
In 1997, after the production of the film Jahan Pahlavan Takhti was left unfinished owing to Ali Hatami's death, Behrouz Afkhami took over the production with Khoshkam's permission and before long, he had made a film in which Khoshkam herself appeared in some scenes. Playing the honorary and small role of Zari Khoshkam as Zahra Hatami in it was her first appearance in a film after the Revolution. In this film, some of Ali Hatami's other friends, relatives and colleagues, such as Mahmoud Kalari, also appeared in an honorary capacity. In addition to working with Behrouz Afkhami, Khoshkam also collaborated with other directors in an honorary way, among which the film Eshg + 2 (عشق+۲) by Reza Karimi should be mentioned, in which Zahra Hatami is thanked.
After many years, Zari Khoshkam's first serious experience in the cinema after the Revolution, again under the name Zahra Hatami, was acting in the film Portrait of a Lady Far Away, directed by her son-in-law Ali Mosaffa in 2002, which is based on the story of her life. An elderly engineer who separated from his wife and son and lived alone, paid, and Zari Khoshkam played the role of an Afghan singer named Khursheed. His daughter, Leila, played the lead role in this film.
Apart from such activities, in later years, Zahra Hatami's name was heard several times from the press and media for other reasons. For example, in 2006, when Mohammad Mehdi Dadgou, a cinema producer, announced that he planned to re-edit parts of the Soltan-e Sahebgharan television series to produce two independent films titled Amir Kabir and Mirzarzai Kermani. Zahra Hatami reacted to this news, showing her opposition to such an action. Also, in the same year, when Tehran's Niagara cinema burnt down, the name of Zahra Hatami as the main owner of this cinema was heard many times.
Zari Khoshkam or Zahra Hatami received the Ali Hatami Award as the best screenwriter of thirty years of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema at the second celebration of the Critics and Writers Association in 2007.
Zahra Hatami's last film appearance was in the film Dar Dunya Tu (2015, Safi Yazdanian's first feature film) in which she played the role of Hawa Khanum next to her son-in-law and her daughter, and after that, she also played a role in Shalevar (2016, Hamid Nematullah) alongside Amin Hayai.
Khoshkam died on 16 May 2024, at the age of 76. Her funeral was held the next day at the Behesht Zahra artists' plot (35°32′04″N 51°22′52″E).
