Shahin Parhami

Shahin Parhami was born in Iran in the magnificent town of Shiraz, renowned as the cultural capital of Persia. 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. His insatiable appetite for movies later inspired him to pursue his studies in film and production first at Ottawa’s Carleton University, and later at Concordia University in Montreal.

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). Accomplished author Shahin Parhami is the mastermind behind all his work, producing his own films and responsible for all creative elements.

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. In his most recent production Faces (Chehreha) (2007), an experimental and multi-layered documentary on 10 Iranian artists living in Canada, Shahin dives into questions that are tied to exile, identity, and maintaining one’s culture in a context of immigration.

Photos

Photo by Babak Salari

Photo by Babak Salari