Shahin Parhami
Born in Shiraz, Iran. After his arrival in Canada in 1988, along with contributions of his poetry and essays to local cultural/art journals, he pursued film studies and production, first at Ottawa’s Carleton University and later at Concordia University in Montreal. He has directed several award-winning short and feature films which have been screened in festivals, art galleries, and universities. From 1997 he worked on a trilogy: Nasoot (1997); Lahoot (1998); and Jabaroot(2003). The last part of the trilogy is a 60-minute poetic documentary on diasporic Iranian traditional music. His films have been selected by many prestigious international film festivals such as the Montreal World Film Festival, Hot Docs, Thessaloniki, and the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema.. Accomplished author Shahin Parhami is the mastermind behind all his work, producing his own films and responsible for all the creative elements (cinematography, Editing, Sound-design,…). In 2007 his film Faces, an experimental documentary premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival and won the best feature film award at the flEXiff 2007 (Sydney, Australia). His latest creative documentary, Amin, which tells the story of an ancient musical tradition and one musician's struggle to preserve it was funded by Asian Network of Documentary (AND), premiered at Pusan International Film Festival, South Korea, 2010, and won awards at Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival(Japan), Taiwan International Documentary Festival and Dubai International Film Festival. Amin was also nominated for best feature documentary at Asian Pacific Screen Awards 2011. Parhami is currently working on new creative documentary, Shahrzaad’s tale, which has been supported by TeleFilm Canada and Asian Network of Documentary (AND) and The Canada Council for the Arts.