Caught Between Two Worlds/Filmmakers

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Simin Farkhondeh is an award winning filmmaker, who has been working as an artist, educator and activist in New York, Europe and Iran. She was born in Germany, raised in Iran and went to college in the US. She is co-director of the Gulf Crisis TV Project, an award winning Deep Dish series that aired on PBS, Channel Four of England and was screened at the Whitney Biennial, and the Margaret Mead Film. From 1995 to 2003 Simin directed the award winning Labor at the Crossroads, a monthly TV program about work, which aired on cable in New York and other cities across the US. In 1999 she produced ADJUNCT AGONY, a short dramatic piece about the plight of adjunct faculty in US universities. In 2001 she produced SALT PEANUTS, a look at the effect of September 11 on airline workers, which screened at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2003 she directed OTHER, a fiction short on the plight of Middle Eastern detainees. Simin is a recipient of the Rockefeller Fellowship Award for WHO GIVES KISSES FREELY FROM HER LIPS, a film about temporary marriage in Iran. She teaches Film and Video Arts at Hampshire College of Massachusetts.

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Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri is an award-winning independent filmmaker, born and raised in Tehran, Iran. When the revolution in Iran broke out she was compelled to stay in the US, where she received her BA from Trinity College in Hartford, Ct., and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University. She has worked as producer for Deep Dish TV on a series about the war in Iraq, for Trinity TV on documentaries about 9/11 and for Internews Network on programs that promote dialogue between societies in conflict. She has also worked for the award-winning PBS series POV, taught film in Boston and New York, and curated a documentary film festival in Tehran. Her personal documentaries about Iran were broadcasted on PBS and have been shown widely in museums, art houses and universities. They are: WOMEN LIKE US (2002); A PLACE CALLED HOME, (1998); FAR FROM IRAN (1990); and finally JOURNAL FROM TEHRAN (1987), a memoir of war days in Tehran, which was a prize winner screened at the Independent Focus series of PBS. Her work is distributed by Women Make Movies.

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Editor Bahman Kiarostami started his work as an assistant director in 1996 and made his first documentary, Morteza Momayez: Father of Iranian Contemporary Graphic Design, in the same year. His subsequent films have focused primarily on art and music, often touching on religious themes.