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
Sanaz Fotouhi
Sanaz Fotouhi is a writer, filmmaker, arts manager, thinker and a mom. She was born in Iran soon after the revolution and at the onset of the war. Thanks to her father’s job (though she wasn’t really thankful for it when she was a teenager) she grew up across Asia, and America before moving to Australia. While living in Hong Kong, Sanaz studied a BA and an MPhil in English Literature from the University of Hong Kong. She particularly had a passion for creative writing and literary theory and criticism, especially modernism, post-colonial and post-modern literatures and theories. She was a passionate nerd who spent every break in the library, and handing in assignments weeks in advance, to the annoyance of her classmates! Her MPhil project (to which one day she will return in the future…) is a comparative study of the short stories of Nadine Gordimer and Katherine Mansfield. It was this passion that led her to her PhD study of Iranian writing in English from a post-colonial perspective where she examined every text of fiction and memoir that she could get her hands on by Iranian writers in English since 1979 to 2014. This study eventuated as a book, The Literature of the Iranian Diaspora: Meaning and Identity Since the Islamic Revolution which has become a seminal text that examines the body of Iranian writing in English between that time.
Mitzi Goldman
Mitzi Goldman is a Producer of Good Pitch² Australia and currently CEO of the Documentary Australia Foundation, bringing philanthropists and filmmakers together to create social change. Mitzi has written, produced, edited and directed award-winning international documentaries for over 25 years. From 2002–2008 Mitzi was Co-Head of Documentary at AFTRS. Her production company, Looking Glass Pictures Pty Ltd, specialises in social impact documentary. Mitzi holds a BA from University of Sydney and a Phd in Cultural Studies.
Stefan Moore
Stefan Moore is a producer/director and executive producer of documentaries in the USA, Britain and Australia. His documentaries have received four Emmys and numerous other awards. In the US, he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the UK Stefan worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an Executive Producer for Film Australia and the ABC where he commissioned a slate of critically acclaimed films and series.
Megan McMurchy
Megan McMurchy is an independent film and television producer with more than 50 hours of television credits. Most recently she executive-produced the two-part documentary Horror Movie: A Low Budget Nightmare for ABC TV. She co-produced feature documentary Tyke Elephant Outlaw (BBC, Netflix) and produced the web series I Luv U But. Her award-winning documentaries include Sadness, Mr Patterns, Mystique of the Pearl, For Love or Money, and the series Fine Line and Hybrid Life. She also produced the feature films Footy Legends, Talk and Breathing Under Water.
Tom Zubrycki
Tom Zubrycki is a filmmaker and producer whose award winning documentaries have earned an international reputation for their truthfulness, realism and humanity. For the last 40 years, his work has mapped Australia’s changing social and political landscape. He has written and directed 15 documentaries, most of them feature-length, and produced another 22 with mostly early career filmmakers. He also has been actively involved in a number of industry organisations including the Australian Directors Guild and OZDOX, the Australian Documentary Forum.
Susan Prior
Susan Prior works extensively in film, television and theatre. She received an AACTA Award for David Michod's film, The Rover. Other films include: Jasper Jones, Animal Kingdom, Book Week, Rising Wolf, Aim High in Creation, Not Suitable for Children, A Cold Summer (co-writer) Idiot Box. She starred in the Oscar-nominated short The Saviour, and Jennifer Kent’s Monster. On television: The Gloaming, Les Norton, Glitch, Riot, Safe Harbour, Top of the Lake, Rake, Puberty Blues (AACTA Award nomination). She has written articles for Inside Film magazine as well.
Robert Mackenzie
Robert Mackenzie is an Australian supervising sound editor who has been enriching the film world with his creative soundscapes for over twenty-five years. He body of work includes Animal Kingdom (2010), The Hunter (2011), Lore (2012), Felony (2013), The Grandmaster (2013), The Rover (2014), Deadline Gallipoli (2015), Partisan (2015), Lion (2016), and critically acclaimed war-drama film Hacksaw Ridge (2017), for which he received two Academy Award nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. Most recently Rob has completed work on The Nightingale and Mystify, Judy & Punch, Top End Wedding, and in addition to David Michôd’s medieval epic, The King.
Rachel Ward
Rachel Ward is an actress, screenwriter and film and television director. She is known for The Thorn Birds (1983), Sharky's Machine (1981) and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). She garnered nomination for ‘New Star of the Year’ award at the Golden Globe for playing Dominoe in the film ‘Sharky's Machine’. Her portrayal of Meggie Cleary in the television miniseries ‘The Thorn Birds’ fetched her a second Golden Globe nomination, afterwhich Rachel Ward featured in several screen productions and feature films. She won several directors awards for ‘The Big House’. Her directorial works also include the film ‘Martha's New Coat’ and ‘Beautiful Kate’.
Bonnie Elliott
Bonnie Elliott is an award-winning cinematographer who works across drama, documentary and video art. Bonnie’s work has screened at major international festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, Tribeca, Rotterdam, Sydney & Melbourne. She has received recognition from the Australian Cinematographer’s Society on numerous occasions. Bonnie shot her debut feature film in Iran. MY TEHRAN FOR SALE, directed by Granaz Moussavi, premiered at the 2009 Adelaide Film Festival, and screened at international film festivals including Toronto, Pusan and Rotterdam.
Mojean Aria
Mojean Aria is an Australian actor, writer and director who won the 2017 Heath Ledger Scholarship award. He attended the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) at the age of fourteen. In 2004 he won a scholarship to The McDonald College High School of Performing Arts. In 2005 he landed a lead role in the feature film Cross Life directed by Claire McCarthy, which premiered at the Sydney Film Festival. He later relocated to Los Angeles. His work has been screened at; Cannes Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and more.
Ata Mehrad
Born in 1989 in Tabriz, Ata was always fond of Arts. He started playing guitar when he was 15 thinking he could be a musician. Later in 2004 he tried graphic designing by designing posters, editing images and studying digital art. In 2006 by entering university, his professional life as an artist commenced. He wrote screenplays, acted and directed several plays. It was in 2014 when he focused on cinema by attending courses on documentary filmmaking, production, script writing and a lot more. Since then Ata has been working as an independent filmmaker.
Siavash Jamali
Siavash Jamali was born in 1984 in Tehran. First, he started acting in theater in 2003 and after that he directed some plays. He started his career as a filmmaker and directed his first movie “Once upon a time there was a man” in 2014. Now he is working as both producer and director and he was executive producer of “Sunless Shadows” (directed by Mehrdad Oskouei).
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.