Interview

Sepide Berenji, poet, writer, director, teacher, and head of the Majara Film School, holds a Bachelor's degree in Persian Language and Literature from the University of Tehran and a Master's degree in Cinema. Her short film "Raya" has been selected for major Iranian...

Editor: Marketa Jakesova  Considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers, Nina Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals including multiple premieres at Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes, Rotterdam,...

Nasrin Mohammadpour, born in 1989 in Mashhad, is a graduate of cinema, sociology, and women's studies. She is also a social worker and researcher, focusing on filmmaking in the domain of women and family. Her works include: The narrative film Zohal (2020) centered on...

All The Time: Hearing that her teenage sister is planning to commit suicide, Toranj is in limbo not knowing how to react... It Turns Blue: Pari covers up domestic violence when her brother beats up his 3 years old daughter. Biography: Shadi Karamroudi is an Iranian...

Film Summary: “Rana, your father is gone forever. From now on, we will live together.” This news is conveyed to six-year-old Rana by her mother at the zoo. The night before, Rana had a dream about a deer that had escaped from the zoo, leaving its cage empty. Nafiseh...

Film Summary: One night in a company where people order dreams, a man's dream does not unfold according to his order. Maryam Bakhtiari is a filmmaker and actress born in 1995 in Tehran. She holds a Master's degree in Cinema from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the...

Khazar Masoumi, born in 1983 in Tehran, began her undergraduate studies in law at the University of Tehran in 2001. In the winter of 2003, she was introduced to Ebrahim Hatamikia for the role of Arghavan in the film "The Color of Arghavan" and was selected for this...

RedCut: How did it happen that, as an actor whose individual creativity—physical and formal—was shaped in front of the camera based on the filmmaker's vision, you decided to step behind the camera and become the narrator of your own mental story? Sonia Sanjari: Some...

Payvand Eghtesadi was born in 1996 in Tehran. She holds a bachelor's degree in Cinema with a focus on Editing from the University of Tehran and is currently pursuing a master's degree in Dramatic Literature at Tarbiat Modares University. She has experience editing...

Asma Ebrahimizadeh Born in 1986, she holds a bachelor's degree in Theater Direction. She served as the first assistant director and production planner for the feature film Fish and Cat (The Fish and the Cat) in 2013, as well as the first assistant director and...

Mania Akbari: Aristotle, by observing and analyzing humans, defined humans as rational animals, recognizing two dimensions: thought and body. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers in the Western philosophical tradition who used animal metaphors and...

BY: EMMA ROBERTSON Ms. Hatoum, do you see darkness in your art? I think your personal experience shapes the way you view the world around you. With 15 years of civil war in Lebanon and conflict in the Middle East ever since I can remember, there is nothing very...

by: May Santiago , October 5, 2023 Nina Menkes’ cinematic language is defined by singularity. Operating outside conceived notions of what a feminist gaze or a body of work defined for a particular spectator should be, she has been making radical experiments with the...

By : Isis Nusair This interview was conducted following the screening of 5 Minutes from Home (2008) in Berlin, Germany in December 2018. Isis Nusair (IN): How did you start making movies? Nahed Awwad (NA): It all started by chance, although I was always interested in...

COMPILED BY GERARD-JAN CLAES, STOFFEL DEBUYSERE I consider what I do as, primarily, bearing witness to my society by way of cinema, with everything that it comprises regarding the contradictions between man and woman, law and practice... I don’t isolate the problem of...

By Nicola Pratt 2014 TAPE 1 Nicola Pratt: When were you born? Arab Loutfi: I was born in Lebanon in 1953, in Sidon, south of Lebanon. NP: Did you grow up in Lebanon? AL: Yes, I grew up in Lebanon. And... I only came to Egypt... and I used to come to Egypt when I was a...

MARYSE LÉON, MAGDA WASSEF, 1978 TRANSLATED BY SIS MATTHÉ Jocelyne Saab has directed a number of documentaries on conflicts in the Arab world. The majority of her work concerns Lebanon, her country, but she has also taken an interest in the Saharawi cause, in Egypt’s...

OLIVIER HADOUCHI, 2014 TRANSLATED BY SIS MATTHÉ   In 1975, the poet and visual artist Etel Adnan appeared in Jocelyne Saab’s first feature-length film, Lebanon in a Whirlwind. Adnan is also the author of the commentary in Saab’s Beirut, Never Again (1976), a...

Zakaria Jaber is an Award Winning multi-talented film director with a diverse range of skills and experiences that he himself developed and have shaped his career. Zakaria is a photographer and videographer with a commitment to master visual storytelling, editing, and...

Eyal Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture and professor at Goldsmiths, discusses and reflects on the connection between the feminist struggle for equality and freedom in Iran, the liberation of Palestine, and the fight against colonialism in this conversation...

Based on research and interviews with both Palestinian hunger strikers and asylum seekers, this absurdist yet realistic film stages a dialogue between the director in her mother tongue that centers on a single question: what do we know about hunger? This film is a...

Dwan Kaoukji is Lebanese and was born and raised in Kuwait. She is a social scientist by profession and recently began exploring her career as a filmmaker. Canary in a Coal Mine is her first short fictional film. Before this film, Dwan directed a short documentary for...

RedCut: How did you start actively in the field of cinema? I have been a screenwriter and writer for about 15 years. Writing for TV serials, arthouse features, for mainstream, for commercial features. (www.ceydaasar.com) I also have a novel just published by a...

Jordan is a visual artist, filmmaker, and Reader in Time-based Media at the Royal College of Art. Jordan received a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Jordan’s films have featured in...

Ahmad Ghossein is a Filmmaker and an artist. He holds an MFA in Visual Art from the National Academy of Art-(KHIO) in Oslo and a BFA in Theater from the Lebanese University, Beirut. Ghossein's latest short film, White Noise, which was produced under the auspices of...

Soudabeh Moradian is a director, producer, screenwriter and editor. She began her career as a filmmaker in 1996 and since then has created more than 70 documentaries, short films, TV series, and feature films. Her films are mainly based on social justice, women’s...

Peter Limbrick, professor, Film & Digital Media, Department Chair, Film & Digital Media, Affiliated Faculty: Feminist Studies, History of Art and Visual Culture. Arab and Middle Eastern Cinemas; Postcolonial and transnational cinemas; settler colonialism;...

Larissa Sansour was born in East Jerusalem, Sansour (PS/DK) studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London, and New York. She represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen...

Prof. Valentina Vitali is a film historian and theorist. Her research explores the interconnections between aesthetics, history, and economics from a comparative perspective. She has published extensively on cinema in South Asia, aspects of Indian visual culture, and...

Renu Savant is a filmmaker and writer based in Mumbai. She is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. She has worked as a journalist and researcher in Mumbai. While studying at the FTII, in 2012 she received the Special Mention as...

iara lee, a Brazilian of Korean descent, is an activist, filmmaker, and founder/director of the Cultures of Resistance Network, an organization that promotes global solidarity and connects and supports agitators, educators, farmers, and artists to build a more just...

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multi-layered practice explores fragile refusals, counter memories and itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice. Andrea has directed five...

Inna Sahakyan is a documentary director, producer, and scriptwriter, born and raised in Yerevan, Armenia. Inna’s work focuses on uncovering untold stories on the nature of humanity via creative and intimate filmmaking. Her her feature-length debut as a director, The...

Egyptian filmmaker Nadia Kamel was born in 1961 in Cairo, where she continues to live and work. The daughter of journalist parents with a long history of political activism, Kamel grew up in a house steeped in progressive politics and a passion for the arts and...

Raed Andoni, a Palestinian filmmaker, began his career in 1997 as a producer. He produced a number of films acclaimed in international festivals and markets. In 2006 he directed his first 60 minute documentary IMPROVISATION which was screened in various international...

I am an independent filmmaker who is growing increasingly impatient with what I consider to be a continued perpetuation of social injustice. I use my films to encourage inquiry into what I perceive to be a social inequity that debilitates, undermines and injures the...

He shot "Sessiz/Be Deng" (Silent) in 2011 which is the second film of the trilogy. The film won the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at Festival Cannes 2012. He has also written the script of the third film of the trilogy. L. Rezan Yesilbas; works as the assistant of...