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Festival Poster
9th Edition
The 9th Persian Film Festival was presented in partnership with Palace Cinemas and showcased the largest film program dedicated to Persian cinema internationally. The 8th Festival was dedicated to women from the Persian-speaking communities and paid tribute to their strength, courage and artistic expression through screening films by women or with women in leading roles, depicting some of the challenges and difficulties they endure and overcome.
Poster of the 9th Persian Film Festival
Designed by Ali Famouri
Festival Jury
Pat Fiske
Pat Fiske is an experienced director and producer. She is recognised as a prominent member of Australia's independent filmmaking community. In 2001 she was awarded the prestigious Stanley Hawes Award for her outstanding contribution to the documentary industry in Australia at AIDC. Pat was Co-Head of the Documentary Department at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School from 2002-2008 and worked as the Documentary Consultant at SBS Independent for eighteen months in 2000-2001. Some of the films she has directed and/or produced are the award-winning documentaries: Rocking the Foundations, a history of the NSW Builders Laborers Federation and the Green Bans; Woolloomooloo; For All the World to See, a portrait of Professor Fred Hollows; 'Doc', a portrait of Herbert Vere Evatt; Australia Daze; Following the Fenceline; Larrikin Lad - Warren Fahey; Leaping off the Edge; An Artist in Eden and Night Patrol. She has produced the two-part series Business Behind Bars; Selling Sickness; River of No Return; Scarlet Road and Love Marriage in Kabul. In 2012-13 she was Supervising Producer for the National Indigenous Documentary Fund 5-part series, Call to Country. Pat has two film companies – Bower Bird Films and Paradigm Pictures. At present she is in development on When Disaster Strikes, Trafficking Jam and When the Camera Stopped Rolling.
Peter Andrikidis
Peter Andrikidis is a Director known for his work on television series such as ‘Cop Shop’ ‘G.P.’, ‘Water Rats’, ‘Wildside’, ‘Grass Roots’ and ‘Farscape’ as well as telemovies such as ‘My Husband My Killer’, ‘Heroes Mountain’ and ‘Blackjack’. Peter directed all seasons of Multi Award Winning ‘East West 101’ as well as the first season of ‘Underbelly’. Peter’s first feature was ‘Kings of Mykonos’ followed bythe comedy ‘Alex and Eve’. Recent projects include ‘The New Legends of Monkey’, ‘Reckoning’ and ‘Eden’. He has won numerous awards for directing/producing and was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for his services to Australian society and Australian film production. 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.
Romaine Moreton
Dr Romaine Moreton is Goenpul Yagera of Stradbroke Island and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales. She is an internationally recognised writer of poetry, prose and film. While a Research Fellow Filmmaker in Residence at Monash, she completed the powerful transmedia work One Billion Beats, that examined the historical representation of Aboriginal people in Australian cinema. Prior to that, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Newcastle and worked on a project about Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property. With Dr Lou Bennett, Romaine has been working closely with AFTRS over the last two years on a first-of-its-kind Indigenous Curriculum for screen and broadcast, focussed through the lens of ethics and aesthetics. Dr Moreton is responsible for leading the design and implementation of the School’s First Nations and Outreach strategy, to ensure that AFTRS is continuing the work of the previous Head of Indigenous, Kyas Hepworth (née Sherriff), and meaningfully embedding First Nations culture in all that the School does, internally and externally, and that AFTRS takes a leadership position as a hub of excellence in learning that is safe, inclusive and accessible to people from all across Australia.
Rahel Romahn
Rahel Romahn is one of the finest actors of his generation. He has worked professionally in Film, Television and Theatre since the age of 13 and continuously grown the plethora of experience he has built in Australia. He was nominated for a AACTA and Logie awards for his complex portrayal of a troubled youth in ‘The Principal’. Since then Rahel has been involved in tv shows such as, the yet to be released Australian Gangster, Mr Inbetween, Janet King, Pulse, Secret City, Cleverman and Underbelly. His film credits include, Down Under, Alex and Eve, The Combination, Ali’s Wedding, Little Monsters and the yet to be released films, Here Out West, Streets of Colour and Moon Rock for Monday. He has also starred in 7 plays at the highly esteemed Sydney Theatre Company in the last 3 years. Rahel is fast becoming one of the most sought after young actors in Australia and will very surely soon be working internationally. He is represented by Shanahan Management.
Helena Sawires
Helana Sawires is an Egyptian-Australian actress, based in Sydney. Born into a large, creative family of artists and musicians, she has always lived under the influence of, and in the world of the performing arts and crafts. After graduating from Newtown High School of the Performing Arts in 2011, Helana travelled for a year through Africa and Europe where she gained much of her inspiration and insight into the human condition. In 2015, she trained under master acting coach Sam Schacht at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. Soon after, she was cast as lead actress in Australian feature film Ali’s Wedding in the role of Dianne, directed by Jeffrey Walker. Her performance earned her nominations for Best Lead Actress at the AACTA Awards, Australian Film Critics Association Awards, and Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards. Months after filming, she returned to Melbourne to play another lead female role as Jomana in Samah Sabawi’s play Tales of a City By the Sea. The play toured nationally and to Malaysia, and was included in the Victorian school curriculum. It won two awards from Drama Victoria and was nominated for the Green Room award for Best Independent Theatre production. Helana’s most recent work is in highly acclaimed Australian Television series, STATELESS (2020), where she played the role of Rosna, a detainee Kurdish Freedom Fighter.
Golden Gazelle Award
Academic Program
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.
Karen Pearlman
Dr Karen Pearlman writes, directs and edits screen productions. She researches creative practice, cognition and feminist film histories. Karen Pearlman is a director, with Richard James Allen, of the critically acclaimed Physical TV Company. Their works have broadcast in Australia and around the world, screened at over 300 international film festivals, and received over 80 nominations or awards. Karen's 2019 film, I want to make a film about women won Best Documentary at the 2020 St Kilda Film Festival, qualifying it for an Academy Award nomination. She was awarded Best Director at the 2020 inaugural CinefestOz Short Film Awards and Best Direction of a Documentary Short Subject at the 2020 Australian Directors’ Guild (ADG) Awards. I want to make a film about women also received the Creative Achievement Award at the 2020 Brisbane International Film Festival Short Film Awards and a Special Mention at the 2020 Sydney Film Festival’s Dendy Awards for its ‘ambitious and masterful mix of forms'. 2016 film, Woman with an Editing Bench, won the ATOM Award for Best Short Fiction. It and Karen’s 2018 documentary, After the Facts, were both honoured with Australian Screen Editors' Guild (ASE) Awards for Best Editing. Karen is a senior lecturer in Screen Production and Practice at Macquarie University, the 2020 Australian Top Research Institution in Film. She and her colleague Dr Iqbal Barkat won the 2019 Australian Award for University Teaching. Before joining Macquarie, Karen held the post of Head of Screen Studies at AFTRS for 6 years. A leading theorist, speaker and writer on the art of film editing, she is the author of Cutting Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing (now in its 2nd edition with Focal Press) and well-known around the world for her YouTube series The Science of Editing created with This Guy Edits.
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.
Book Launch
The Persian Film Festival is pleased to celebrate the launch of Sanaz Fotouhi’s new book, Love Marriage in Kabul: A Memoir (Gazebo, 2020).
In the film industry, we are familiar with the process of adaptation where usually the story line of a book is translated into the visual world of a film. However, there are few instances where a book is written about or based on a film. In this discussion, join Sanaz Fotouhi, Karen Pearlman and Catherine Lumby as they discuss Fotouhi’s latest book Love Marriage in Kabul: A Memoir, which chronicles the making of and behind the scene of the award winning documentary by the same nam.
Love Marriage in Kabul: A Memoir is the behind-the-scenes account of the hardships and heartaches, tears and joys of the seemingly impossible project of making a film in Afghanistan. It is the story of a young woman’s determination to confront her fears to provide an insight into the hidden world of Afghanistan’s widows and orphans. With rare compassion and lucidity, Sanaz Fotouhi chronicles her inner struggles and external events and leads us to interrogate our own notion of humanity.
