Faces

Chehreh-haa

Shahin Parhami, Canada, 2007, 92 min

In Farsi, English, and French with English subtitles

Toronto premiere, Winner, Best Feature, Sydney Film Festival 2007.

Script: Shahin Parhami

Cast: Shahram Golchin, Babak Salari, Hosein Sharang, Nima Mazaheri, Mehdi Reis-Firouz

Saturday, 8 November 2008, at 7:00 p.m

Innis Town Hall

Director and cast will be in attendance for Q/A

Documentarian Shahin Parhami interviews 10 Iranian-Canadian artists who have practiced their craft in the west since the revolution. The interviews are complimented by free-form montages which center on the changing landscape of Iranian art and history. The audience not only sees these sequences for themselves but also sees them through the eyes of veteran actor Shahram Golchin who is subjected to a different montage upon awaking each morning.

This multi-layered documentary reflects on politics, pop culture, history, and the power of popular media as it crafts a new face for contemporary Iranian art and culture. Shahin explores questions about exile, identity, and maintaining one’s culture in the context of immigration.

Watch Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk1aMc63IKQ

Shahin Parhami

Shahin Parhami was born in Iran. After his arrival to Canada in 1988, he quickly became an active writer of poetry and essays for local Iranian-Canadian publications on arts and culture. Shahin directed his first movie Nasoot in 1997, which was screened in many film festivals. This poetic meditation on the death of three Iranian refugees constituted the first part of a trilogy on Iran and diaspora, which he later completed with Lahoot (1998) and Jabaroot (2003).

An ardent lover of poetry, Shahin develops his scripts with a simple style of writing that borrows from the far-distant traces of Cocteau to reveal a rich and fascinating expression.