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
Amir Parsamehr
Amir Parsamehr is known for Raha (2011) and The IVth Man (2012).
Peyman Naimi
Peiman Naimi (1975, Iran) was educated at the Iranian selective school National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents. After graduating there, he studied Medicine for six years and then studied film at the Art University of Tehran. Naimi has directed one short documentary and two short fictional films so far.
Bahram Ark
Bahram Ark is a director and scriptwriter who was born in 1989 in Tabriz, Iran. Ark Brothers most notable work is directing "Animal" movie."Skin" movie is the first feature film by the Ark brothers and the first film to be made in the Turkish language. In the 36th Fajr Film Festival, they won the Crystal Simorgh Award for Best Short Film. They have also directed the short film "Najis".
Catharine Lumby
Professor Catharine Lumby is the author and co-author of six books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is writing a literary biography of the author Frank Moorhouse for Allen and Unwin. Catharine writes a regular column for The Guardian. She also a longstanding social commentator on radio and television. Catharine delivers talks and workshops to schools for educators, parents and young people on social media, ethics and respectful relationships. Since 2004, Catharine has worked in a pro-bono role advising the National Rugby League on cultural change and education programs for players. Before entering academia in 2000, she was a journalist and opinion writer and has worked for The Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC and The Bulletin magazine. She was the foundation Chair of the Media and Communications Department at Sydney University and the foundation Director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at UNSW. She joined Macquarie University in 2013. She has been the recipient of eight Australian Research Council grants and has completed research projects for organisations as diverse as Google Australia, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, the Australian Sports Commission and the National Rugby League. She sits on the Council of the National Museum of Australia.
Sonia K Hadad
Sonia K. Hadad is an Iranian writer and director. She studied Film and Media Arts (M.F.A) at Emerson College in Boston. She was born in 1989, in Tehran, and was primarily educated in her native country. She holds diplomas in Physics/ Mathematics and graphic design. In 2005 Sonia started her professional theatre acting career and has played in theatres, public performances, telefilms, and TV shows. In 2009 she completed her B.A in dramatic literature from Azad University of Art and Architecture. While pursuing her bachelor’s degree she participated in different professional Filmmaking, Acting, Installation, and editing workshops. Writing short stories for magazines and acting led her to her main interests: Film and Installation Art. Sonia moved to the U.S. in 2013 to continue her education, and she began making short films. In her most recent works, Sonia makes an effort to explore people’s inner lives, women’s social and personal issues, shame, and struggles with their deepest fears through different art forms and media. Her latest film, EXAM (2019), premiered at the Toronto IFF.
Shohini Chaudhuri
Shohini Chaudhuri's main research and teaching area is World Cinema, with particular interests in film and human rights, film-philosophy, feminist and postcolonial theory. Her work develops transnational and comparative frameworks to explore links between different film cultures. She has written four books - Crisis Cinema in the Middle East: Creativity and Constraint in Iran and the Arab World (2022), Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship (2014), Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia (2005) and Feminist Film Theorists (2006). Her article (co-authored with Howard Finn) on New Iranian Cinema has been published in Screen and reprinted in two anthologies, Screening World Cinema, ed. Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn (2006) and Gender, Genre, Race, and World Cinema, ed. Julie Codell (2007). She has also published articles in the journals Camera Obscura, Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics, South Asian Popular Culture, and Screening the Past, as well as essays in numerous edited collections, such as Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture, ed. Michael Lawrence and Rachel Tavernor (2018), The Blackwell Companion to Wong Kar-wai, ed. Martha Nochimson (2016) and Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World, ed. Christina Hellmich and Lisa Purse (2017). Her most recent book is the result of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for a project titled Creativity and Constraint: Contemporary Cinema in Iran and the Arab World. A film activist as well as educator, Shohini has researched and curated film programmes for The Mosaic Rooms, London, and the Art Exchange, University of Essex, and has organized public film events for the NGO Amnesty International and other cultural institutions. Additional information: She would particularly welcome applications for Ph.D. theses on the intersecting areas of film, human rights, and critical and cultural theory
Mahsa Salamati
Dr Mahsa Salamati completed her PhD in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales. Her research is concerned with the dynamics and politics of transnational film circulation in the Iranian context. Her work focuses on cultural policies, the international film festival circuit and piracy.
Farhad Delaram
Independent filmmaker Farhad Delaram was born in Tehran, Iran in 1988. His lifelong love towards cinema led him to study cinema at University of Tehran where he focused his studies on the subject of sound in poetic cinema and received his MA with honor. He also has published a paper about aesthetics of sound in cinema in Avanca congress 2016. He started his career when he was 18 as a screenwriter in Iran's National Radio and Television and also in private filmmaking studios, besides working as an independent screenwriter. Farhad has made six independent short films (as director, writer, photographer, editor and sound editor) including two very low budget documentaries and four fiction films. His last film (Tattoo/2019) won several awards including Crystal Bear for Best Short Film at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival in Generation 14plus section.
Mahboba Rawi
Mahboba Rawi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. At just 15 years of age, Mahboba was forced to flee from Soviet authorities and lived for two years in a Pakistan refugee camp until she married and moved to Australia. Despite suffering a personal tragedy in 1992 when she lost her son in a drowning accident, Mahboba worked tirelessly to help Afghan refugees in Australia, by teaching them swimming and English. In 1998, after a plea for help from a Doctor in Peshawar, Pakistan, Mahboba began to raising money and awareness for Afghan widows and orphans living in refugee camps. Her passion for the well-being of the Afghan people led to the formation of Mahboba’s Promise Inc in 2001. Mahboba’s Promise is known around the world as a reputable charity dedicated to directly improving the lives of vulnerable women and children of Afghanistan. Since Mahboba’s Promise was established, Mahboba’s determination has led to the establishment of Hope Houses, Primary and Secondary schools for both boys and girls, primary health care services in rural areas, and vocational programs for women and young people, providing them with the tools required to live a self-sufficient life. Not only has Mahboba’s Promise made a huge impact in Afghanistan, it has concurrently built bridges between Australian and Afghan communities.
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Powerhouse Museum
500 Harris St, Ultimo NSW 2007
Nima Javidi
Nima Javidi was born in 1980. A qualified mechanical engineer, Javidi began making short films in 1999 and has made Marathon Paralyzed Champion (1999), A Call for O (2001), The Poor Earth (2004), Changeable Weather (2007), Crack (2009) and Catnap (2010). He has also directed two documentaries, Person (2007) and An Ending to an Ancient Profession (2007) and more than 30 television commercials. Melbourne (2014), which he wrote and directed, is his feature film debut. It won Best Film at the Cairo Film Festival and Best Script at the Stockholm Film Festival and opened the Venice Film Critic’s Week.
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.