TINA GHARAVI

Tina Gharavi is a filmmaker whose work focuses on ‘untold stories, unheard voices’ and storytelling from the margins. She initially trained as a painter in the United States and studied cinema in France. She’s noted for innovative cross-platform with work that appears in museums and galleries as well as being site-specific. She has made endearing, inimitably voiced films on subjects as diverse as Muhammad Ali, teenage sexuality, Yemeni-British sailors, The Lackawanna 6, death row exonerees, refugees and lighthouses. She recently completed her first feature, I Am Nasrine, a coming of age story of two teenage Iranian refugees in the North of England that was nominated for a BAFTA in 2013. The project patron Sir Ben Kingsley called it “a life enhancing film, an important and much needed film”. Peter Bradshaw gave the film 4 stars and called it “A valuable debut, shot with a fluent kind of poetry.” Since leaving Iran in 1979 she has been a true nomad (like her great-grandfather from the Bakhtiari tribe in Iran). Carrying no less than 4 passports she currently resides in Northern England. She is currently working on a large budget genre film (a gangster tale set in France and Iran) and a documentary about the prison system in the US and the UK. Unafraid to take risks and cross genres, Gharavi’s work is set apart by it’s attention to detail and storytelling perspective. Programmer Shari Frilot said of Gharavi’s Sundance debut ‘Closer’ that ‘it takes documentary to the next level.’ She is at once a lyrical filmmaker but also a commercial one. As Deborah Ross writes in The Spectator, “It’s not what I would call An Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter. Instead, it is affectionate, humane, tender and, ultimately, optimistic. So stir yourself…” Gharavi is represented as a director by Independent Talent.