Official Selection | Features
Official Selection | Shorts
Festival Poster
4th Edition
The 4th Persian Film Festival opened with the highly anticipated Australian premiere of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s award-winning feature The President. The festival hosted eight national and international guests, including Alireza Amini and Bita Beigi from Iran, Saeed Sourati and Nora Niasari from Australia, and Alexandria Bombach from the USA. The festival guests engaged audiences in Q&A sessions after their screenings.
Poster of the 4th Persian Film Festival
Designed by Amin Palangi
Festival Guests
Osamah Sami
Osama Sami is an award-winning actor, writer, poet and comedian, born in war-torn Iran to Iraqi parents. His critically acclaimed memoir Good Muslim Boy, published by Hardie Grant, was the Winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and Highly Commended at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. His play adaptation of the book will be staged by the Malthouse Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company as part of their 2018 season. Osamah is also the writer (alongside screenwriting legend Andrew Knight), and star of Ali’s Wedding, which earned them the AWGIE Award for Best Original Feature Film. He is currently writing The Market, a 4 X 1 hour mini series for SBS (produced by December Media); When the birds aren’t free to be buried, a feature animation (Emerald Pictures); and working on a feature film based on his book (Matchbox Pictures). Osamah is recognised as a ‘notable Australian Muslim’ by the Commonwealth of Australia.
Rebecca Barry
Rebecca’s driving passion is to facilitate stories, share these with an audience in a creative way and get people thinking. She was director and producer of the feature documentary, I am a Girl, which was launched in cinemas in 2013 to sell-out sessions, and was nominated for four AACTA Awards including Best Direction in a Documentary, as well as a nomination for Best Direction in a Documentary Feature at the Australian Directors Guild Awards. Rebecca was a producer of The Surgery Ship (SBS & National Geographic), Call Me Dad (ABC), Psychics in the Suburbs (ABC) and controversial human rights film The Opposition, and an Impact Producer on feature documentary, Embrace.
Negar Mottahedeh
Negar Mottahedeh is Associate Professor of Literature and Women's Studies at Duke University currently teaching as Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Her work has been published in Camera Obscura, Signs, Iranian Studies, Radical History Review, MERIP, The Drama Review, Early Popular Visual Culture, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In 2008, Duke University Press published her book on Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema entitled Displaced Allegories. Her first book, Representing the Unpresentable, on visual history and reform in Iran from the 19th century to the present was published in 2008 by Syracuse University Press. A perceptive theorist of Iranian visual culture, Professor Mottahedeh writes and speaks about culture, innovation and digital technologies. Her current research and writing on the uses of social media in uprisings for civil liberties and equality around the world, supplement her engagement as blogger and activist. She tweets as negaratduke.
Gay Breyley
Gay researches popular music history in Australian, Iranian and diasporic contexts. She is also founding convener of the Central and West Asia and Diasporas Research Network.
Rosa Holman
Rosa Holman is currently completing her second year of her Master of Arts research thesis at the University of Melbourne. Her research is focused on the topic of “Iranian Neo-Realist Cinema and Political Allegorization”.
Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd
Remy Hii began his career on stage at the age of 19 with the Queensland Theatre Company in the award winning play The Estimator. Television roles soon followed, and three years of full time study with the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney, Australia where he graduated in 2011. Weeks after graduating, Hii was cast in Alex Proyas' film 'Paradise Lost' as a fallen Angel alongside Bradley Cooper's Lucifer. The production however was shutdown citing budgetary reasons. Immediately following, Hii appeared playing the true story of Van Tuong Nguyen, an Australian sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Singapore. For his role as Van in Better Man, Remy was nominated for the AACTA Award for Best Lead Actor in a Television Drama, and won the Graham Kennedy Award For Most Outstanding Newcomer. Hii was introduced to international audiences as Prince Jingim, heir to the Kublai Khan's Mongolian Empire in the Netflix/Weinstein Original production Marco Polo. Remy underwent rigorous physical training for the role including martial arts, archery, horse riding, and performed his own stunts on the show. Hii returned to the stage in the Sydney Theatre Company production of The Golden Age in 2016.
Ann Marie Fleming
Ann Marie Fleming is an award-winning Canadian visual artist, writer, director, animator and cross-platform media maker who works in a variety of genres (animation, experimental, documentary and drama). Ann Marie’s 2016 animated feature Window Horses, about a young Canadian poet discovering her family history, received awards all over the world.
MEL | Palace Kino Melbourne
45 Collins Street, Melbourne
Sam French
A founding director of Development Pictures based in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sam French is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has appeared on Channel 4, Al Jazeera, National Geographic, HBO, and other broadcast outlets. In 2011, Sam directed “Buzkashi Boys,” one of the first narrative fiction films to be shot entirely on location in Kabul with a mixed Western and Afghan crew. This film was the first project of the Afghan Film Project, a non-profit NGO that Sam co-founded in 2010 to help train Afghan filmmakers and foster Afghanistan’s film industry.
Navid Danesh
Navid Danesh was born in Oroumieh, Iran in 1985. During university time he got enthusiastic about cinema. After graduation in English Translation in 2006, he started his activities as a filmmaker by making short films in Asghar FARHADI and Abbas KIAROSTAMI's filmmaking workshops. His short films included: Tree (2007), Circle (2008), The Wind Will Carry Me, Even Behind The Window (2009), The Wind Carries Me Wherever It Wants (2010), Duet (2012-2013).
Ehsan Jafari
Ehsan Jafari was born in 12th September 1982, he began his cinematic carrier by working in a 35mm film laboratory in Iran for 8 years. He then moved on to becoming an assistant editor on several feature films. His filmography includes: Tow Phones (1999), No Name (2001), Waiting for… (2005), Play of Cards (2007), Stop! (2008), Empty Room (2008), The Wall (2009), The Boxes (2011).
Ruhollah Masroor
Ruhollah Masroor is a young photographer that has worked as cameraman for the past 6 years. He enjoys the experience of working behind the scenes with famous Iranian directors as film editor and sound recorder.
Special Event
Love Marriage in Kabul: Fundraiser
The festival hosted a special fundraiser screening of Amin Palangi’s award winning Love Marriage in Kabul and donated the proceeding to Mahboba’s Promise Charity.