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
Saman Salur
Saman Salur (born 1976 Boroujerd) is an award winning Iranian filmmaker and screen writer. His first long movie, Residents of Silent Land won award in Kyiv International Film Festival, Ukraine. His feature film Several Kilos of Dates for Burial Ceremony won Golden Leopard and Special Prize of the Jury at Locarno International Film Festival 2006.
Pirooz Kalantari
Born in 1953 in Tehran, Pirooz Kalantari is a graduate of Tehran's High College of Film & TV in 1974. He started his career as journalist since 1986 and he collaborated with Film Monthly mostly as a film critic. He made his first documentary, The Refugee in 1992 and the film got two awards: Press Prize of the 3rd Tokyo Global Environmental Film Festival of 1994 and the Bronze Torch of Best Documentary at the 5th Pyongyang Film Festival of 1995. He made his second documentary, Lasting Story in 1993 and co-directed To Whom You Show These Films in 1994 together with Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. The Little Story-Tellers of a Strange Village was completed in 1995 and Unfinished Shot in 1996. Mr. Kalantari made Story of Another Shoe in 1997 and his internationally successful film; Alone in Tehran (1999) was shown in many film festivals around the world. He completed his controversial film, That Is Life in 2002 that deals with college students in Tehran and their lost ideals, dreams and hopes. His next documentary films are Tarseh (2003), Gharghab (2004), Tehran, A Few Richter (2006), In Un-ended Streets (2009), Reading Salinger’s Works at City Park (2011), Four Views (2012) and If There Were Not the Aged-People (20120.Pirooz Kalantari has been the founding member of Iranian Society of Documentary Film Directors and has made several researches on the history of Iranian cinema and especially Iranian documentary cinema.
Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French contemporary graphic novellist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author. Satrapi grew up in Tehran in a family which was involved with communist and socialist movements in Iran prior to the Iranian Revolution. She attended the Lycée Français there and witnessed, as a child, the growing suppression of civil liberties and the everyday-life consequences of Iranian politics, including the fall of the Shah, the early regime of Ruhollah Khomeini, and the first years of the Iran-Iraq War.
Massoud Bakhshi
Massoud Bakhshi was born in 1972 in Tehran. He holds a special place in Iranian cinema, which is abounding with creativity. His talent becomes obvious in his documentaries, going from serious drama (IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN) to the most biting and caustic humour (TEHRAN HAS NO MORE POMEGRANATES!) and in his first fiction short film (BAG DAD BARBER). A RESPECTABLE FAMILY is his first feature film.
Hiner Saleem
Hiner Saleem (also transliterated as Hiner Salim) is an Iraqi–Kurdish film director. His memoir, My Father's Rifle, has been translated into several languages. Hiner Saleem was born in the town of Aqrah in Iraqi Kurdistan. He left Iraq at the age of 17, and soon made his way to Italy, where he completed school and attended university. Later on, he moved to France where he lives now. In 1992, after the First Gulf War, he filmed undercover the living conditions of Iraqi Kurds. This footage was shown at the Venice Film Festival. In 1997, he made his first movie Vive la marie ... et la liberation du Kurdistan. This was followed by the films Passeurs de rêves (Beyond Our Dreams; 2000) Vodka Lemon (2003), Kilomètre Zéro (2005), Dol (2007), and Les Toits de Paris (Beneath the Rooftops of Paris; 2007).
Bahman Ghobadi
Bahman Ghobadi was born on February 1st, 1969 in Baneh, a city near the Iran- Iraq border in the province of Kurdistan, Iran. He was the first son in a family of seven siblings. He lived in Baneh until, at the age of 12, civil disputes caused his entire family to immigrate to Sanandaj, the center of Kurdistan Province in Iran. After graduating from high school in Sanandaj, Ghobadi moved to Tehran in 1992. He started his artistic career in the field of Industrial Photography. Though he attended the Iranian Broadcasting College, he never graduated. Rather than following a formal curriculum, he believed the only way he could learn the craft of cinema was by tirelessly making short films. Using 8mm film, his starting point was to shoot a series of short documentaries. Through his instinctive and hands-on approach to filmmaking, Ghobadi developed a unique style, soon gaining widespread local recognition. A breakthrough came with "Life in a Fog" (1999), one of the most acclaimed shorts ever made in Iran. Following this success, Bahman Ghobadi went on to make A Time for Drunken Horses" (2000)- the first feature-length Kurdish film in the history of Iran. In the wake of being awarded several different International Awards, Ghobadi attracted international attention and established himself as a pioneer of Kurdish cinema. This film and all subsequent made by Ghobadi (among others, “Half Moon”, 2004, and “Turtles Can Fly”, 2006) were widely praised at film festivals the world over, gathering dozens of awards, but were little or not seen in his native country. In 2009, Ghobadi completed "No One Knows About Persian Cats"- a semi- documentary about the underground indie music scene in Tehran, filmed in Iran without an official permit and in very restricted conditions. He has since had to leave Iran and continue working abroad. His latest film to date, “Rhino Season” (2012), was shot in Istanbul.
Majid Majidi
Tehran born Majidi grew up in a middle class Iranian family. By the time he was 14, he started acting in amateur theatre groups which led him to study at the Institute of Dramatic Art in Teheran. After the Islamic revolution in 1978, his interest in cinema brought him to act in various films, such as Boycott (1985). By 1992, Majidi made his debut as a director and screenwriter with the feature Baduk (1992), which was presented at the Quinzaine of Cannes and won several awards nationwide. Since then, he has written and directed several films that have won worldwide recognitions, most notably Children of Heaven (1997) that won the "Best Picture" at Montreal International Film Festival and nominated for best foreign film at the Oscar Academy Awards. The film was soon followed by another success, The Color of Paradise (1999) which also won the Best Picture award at Montreal International Film Festival, and Baran (2001) which won seven major awards at the Teheran International film Festival and the Best Picture award at the 25th Montreal International Film Festival.
Amir Naderi
Born on 15 August, 1946 in Abadan, Amir Naderi is an Iranian film director, screenwriter and one of the most influential figures of 20th-century Persian cinema. Naderi developed his knowledge of cinema by watching films at the theater where he worked as a boy, reading film criticism, and making relationships with leading film critics. He began his career with still photography for Iranian features. In the 1970s, Naderi turned to directing, and made some of the most important features of the New Iranian Cinema. In 1971, his directorial debut Goodbye Friend was released in Iran. Naderi first came into under the international spotlight with two classics of cinema: The Runner (1985) and Water, Wind, Dust (1989). After a numbers of his films were banned by the Iranian government, Mr. Naderi left the country. Expatriating to New York, Mr. Naderi continued to produce new work. He was named a Rockefeller Film and Video fellow in 1997, and has served as an artist in residence and instructor at Columbia University, the University of Las Vegas, and New York’s School of Visual Arts. His U.S. films have premiered at the Film Society of Lincoln Center/MOMA’s New Films New Director’s series, the Venice, Cannes, Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals. His last feature Sound Barrier (2005) won the prestigious Roberto Rossellini Prize at the Rome Film Festival.
Dariush Mehrjui
Dariush Mehrjui (1939-2023) is an Iranian director, screenwriter, producer, and film editor. As an Iranian New Wave cinema icon, Mehrjui is regarded to be one of the intellectual directors of Iranian cinema. Most of his films are inspired by literature and adopted based on Iranian and foreign novels and plays.
Tahmineh Milani
Tahmineh Milani (born 1 September 1960) is a professional film director, screenwriter, and producer who came to the limelight by breaking all the traditional and conventional norms about women and their presence in Iran's society. Being sentenced to prison have not stopped her from expressing their feminist ideas freely and finally her style has become a canon against which other feminist works would be evaluated. Milani was born 1960 in Tabriz, Iran.
Majid Barzegar
Majid Barzegar is an Iranian film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. He established his own film company Rainy pictures in 2005 with the aim of stimulating the independent film production in Iran.
Vida Irani
Vida Irani has been an avid film enthusiast for most of her life. In 2015 she finally had the opportunity to direct her first short film Stigma, a documentary about the taboo subject of attempted suicide. Stigma screened at the 23rd Sydney Film School Festival and was nominated for best director. In 2016 Vida directed Duet, a short drama about the volatility of relationships in the bedroom. She is also an emerging production designer, currently enrolled in the production design stream of the advanced diploma of Sydney Film School.
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.