Official Selection | Features
Official Selection | Shorts
Festival Poster
6th Edition
The 6th Persian Film Festival closed successfully in Sydney having attracted over 2,000 audiences. The festival screened eight features and shorts, and held a retrospective on acclaimed Iranian director Amir Naderi. In addition, In partnership with Art Gallery NSW and The Association of Iranica in Australasia, we hosted a full day of engagement, discussion and cutting-edge research on Iranian Cinema and a tribute to Abbas Kiarostami.
Poster of the 6th Persian Film Festival
Designed by WSU Students
Festival Jury
Rosemary Blight
Rosemary Blight is one of the founding partners of Goalpost Pictures Australia a leading independent producer of Feature Film and TV drama. Film credits include HOLDING THE MAN, directed by Neil Armfield, FELONY, directed by Matthew Saville and written by Joel Edgerton and the box office hit THE SAPPHIRES, directed by Wayne Blair which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. They are in post production on the feature film STEM with Blumhouse Productions, directed by Leigh Whannell. Recent television credits include the acclaimed CLEVERMAN produced with ABC TV Australia & SundanceTV (US) & FIGHTING SEASON for Foxtel.
Ben Ferris
Ben Ferris is one of the founders of Sydney Film School, where he is currently the Director and a writing/directing teacher. Ferris, a film writer/director, has screened films and won numerous awards in Paris, New York, Croatia, Italy, Tokyo, Singapore and Amsterdam, as well as having theatrical releases of his works in Tokyo, Croatia, and Australia. His short film ‘The Kitchen’ (2003) won the Grand Prix at the Akira Kurosawa Memorial Short Film Festival in Tokyo in 2005, and his short film ‘Ascension’ (2004) won the Grand Prix at the 4th One Take Film Festival in Croatia in 2004. His debut feature film ‘Penelope’, an Australian–Croatian co-production, screened in National Competition at the 56th Pula Film Festival in Croatia in 2009, and won a Van Gogh Award for Best Fantasy Film at the Amsterdam Film Festival in 2010. In 2016 he completed his second feature film ‘57 Lawson’ which captures daily life within a social housing building in Redfern, under the shadow of impending development. The film is currently on the international festival circuit, and has been critically well received. In 2015, Ferris was the curator of the Sydney Cinémathèque. His writings on cinema have been published worldwide in both French and English.
Jen Peedom
Jen Peedom is a BAFTA nominated director, known for her gripping, intimate portraits of people in extreme circumstances. Her credits include the internationally renowned documentaries SOLO, SHERPA and most recently MOUNTAIN, a collaboration with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. SHERPA, was critically acclaimed on the international festival circuit, including Telluride, Toronto and London Film festivals, winning multiple awards including the Grierson Award for Best Documentary at the BFI London Film Festival, the Australian Film Critics Circle Award, the Australian Directors Guild Award, several audience awards and a BAFTA nomination in 2016. The film became the third highest grossing Australian documentary in history. Her most recent film, MOUNTAIN is currently touring with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and will have its international premiere at San Sebastian Film Festival. Madman will release the film in September 2017. In 2010, Jen was the inaugural recipient of the David & Joan Williams Documentary Fellowship which recognizes and rewards creative ambition, intellectual rigour and innovation in documentary cinema.
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.
Golden Gazelle Award
Retrospective
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.
Amir Naderi: A Tribute
To celebrate the life and cinema of acclaimed Iranian director, Amir Naderi,in partnership with Cinema Azadi, the festival hosted several screenings of some Naderi’s works.
Academic Program
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.
Michelle Langford
Dr Michelle Langford is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research spans the cinemas of Iran and Germany. Her research on Iranian cinema has focussed on gender, allegory and aesthetics and had appeared in leading film studies journals including Camera Obscura, Screenand Screening the Past. Her forthcoming book is entitled Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance(Bloomsbury). Her current research project looks at the German films of Iranian filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless.
Symposium and Tribute
In partnership with Art Gallery NSW and The Association of Iranica in Australasia, the festival hosted a full day of engagement, discussion and cutting-edge research on Iranian Cinema. This conference features cross-disciplinary discourse on the impact and presence of Iranian cinema across the globe and includes screening of above films in honnor of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Associate Professor Negar Mottahedeh from Duke University presented alongside Australian experts in contemporary Iranian Film and Screen, including Dr Amin Palangi, from Western Sydney University, Dr Michelle Langford from the University of NSW, Dr Rosa Holman from Deakin University, Dr Gay Breyley from Monash University, a PhD panel of students in Film & Screen Studies and the Art Gallery NSW film program producer, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd.