Gender

Male

Location

Lincoln, CA

Filmmakers: What is your primary skill and where do you work most?

Norcal Directing, Writer Norcal

My current Project Title:

Hero Mom

I describe myself as a

SFF Filmmaker

About me - current project:

I am an Iranian-American filmmaker whose work explores the intimate human consequences of displacement, identity, and political repression. Working across fiction, documentary, and hybrid cinema, I am drawn to stories in which personal lives reveal the deeper human impact of social and political realities. My feature film The Other (Digari) received the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Children’s Feature Film, one of the Asia-Pacific region’s highest cinematic honors. My films have been selected for major international festivals, including Busan, Shanghai, Warsaw — Main Competition, Seminci–Valladolid, Göteborg, Thessaloniki, and others. I am particularly interested in stories situated at the intersection of the personal and the political stories of migration, memory, resilience, identity, and belonging. I approach filmmaking through observational realism and emotionally restrained storytelling, allowing complexity, ambiguity, and human experience to remain at the center of the work. I am a member of the Asia Pacific Screen Academy and the European Documentary Network (EDN). For eight consecutive years, I served as a Festival Advisor and Jury Member of the ImagineIndia International Film Festival in Madrid. Based in the Sacramento, I continue to develop internationally oriented projects that move between cultures and perspectives. At the heart of my work is a commitment to telling stories that give voice to people living at the margins of history and power, while creating space for audiences to see the world, and one another, from a different perspective.

My home region is:

Capital Region