Sepideh Farsi knew she wanted to be a filmmaker at 16 — the same year she was arrested for resisting the Iranian regime. Ever since, she has remained equally committed to her art and her ideals, often focusing on political activism, the experience of exile, and the search for identity in her work. When she’s not shooting a film, she splits her time between Paris and Athens, where you’re likely to see her passing by on her bike or on a run, heading to a café or riding up and down the hills. We spoke to Sepideh about her filmography, how her curious nature helps her find her subjects, and balancing motherhood and her career.
This feature was made in association with Metrograph. We are also partnering with Metrograph to screen three of Sepideh’s films. We hope you’ll join us.
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on her morning routine
I wake up early, 6:30-7:00ish, with the daylight. I’m very sensitive to light. Then I do some language exercises — I’m working on my Greek and I’m learning some Arabic and Spanish. I read some news, and then social media a bit. I used to look at Twitter, but since it became X I’ve stopped. I don’t look at Facebook much. I’m retreating from social media. My morning ritual is radio; I listen between 7 am and 9 am. I always listen to France Culture, and then at 9:00 sharp, on Greek radio, there is a brief two- or three-minute broadcast about language. And after that, I'm off for the day.
I try to do yoga every day. When I can, I do it in the morning, but if I can’t, I’ll catch up later in the day or even in the evenings.
on growing up in iran
I was born in Tehran. A year or so before the revolution, we moved to Mashhad. It’s much more religious there, but it was my parents’ hometown. We moved back because my dad had to take care of the land that had belonged to my grandfather after he passed away.
My parents were not active politically, but they had a political consciousness. Both sides of my family were against the Shah; they were all left-wing. My uncles were really left-wing. They were both in exile — one in Paris, one in London. So, I grew up with this consciousness of being against the mainstream, with this dissident tradition on both sides of my family.
When I was a child, the Shah founded the Rastakhiz party, and people were pushed to become party members. My parents were very critical of that. We had cousins in jail as political prisoners. That was all in the background as I grew up, so, I had this political consciousness. I'm not saying I had a formal political education, but the sensibility was there. And then the revolution happened. I was out on the streets protesting at the age of 13. Many young people were involved.
on her creative education
My mother studied at university, but she never worked outside the home. She was into reading, and she gave me an education in music. I used to take piano lessons and at a very young age, I fantasized about being an orchestra conductor. I loved Beethoven. But I realized very quickly that although I liked music, I didn't have what it would take to be creative in that field. The first thing that clicked for me creatively was photography. When I was around 12, I took my dad’s camera. He wasn’t really using it. It was an old Russian camera and I started buying film stock to take photos. Then, when I was 16, I signed up for a course to learn photography. It turned out to be more of a film analysis course, along with some photography. It was a very intensive one-month course, and that was where I fell in love with cinema. So, from the age of 16, I knew that I wanted to be a filmmaker.
on getting arrested at sixteen
The photography and cinema course stopped for the summer. This was in 1981. In the fall, the universities closed, but high school reopened, and I went back to school. I remember that many kids my age went into hiding because they knew what was coming — arrests and things like that. But I thought that I hadn’t really done anything, so why would I hide? I kept going to school for two months, and then in November, I got arrested. I had been giving shelter to a fellow high schooler who had nowhere to go, and someone else gave up our address under torture. Our house was raided, and they arrested me, my mom, and my friend. She was tortured and killed. My mother was set free after a month and a half, and I was in jail for eight months.
Recently, two judges were killed in Iran. One of them was the man who had judged and sentenced me after my arrest. The whole trial took three minutes. And then I was sentenced to one year in prison and 10 years suspended. I ended up spending eight months in jail, but the 10-year sentence is still there if they catch me.
on moving to paris
When I got out, I was 17, and I was banned from school. I finished high school by myself, studying at home for two years. I studied math and science. I was a good student, and art was not taken seriously in most families back then. Telling my family that I wanted to make films – it was inconceivable. It was somehow unimaginable. And so, I studied science. By the time I finished my high school education, the university had reopened after three years of the so-called Cultural Revolution. I took the entrance exam and I got a very good ranking, but despite that, because of my time in jail and my political record, I was banned from the university. I decided to leave — they had told me I couldn’t leave Iran, but I was issued a passport by mistake. So, I left and came to Paris to stay with my uncle, who was an activist and an architect. I was applying to San Francisco University in the States, and I thought Paris would just be a stopover, where I would get a visa since there was no US Embassy in Iran anymore. But I was denied a US visa. So, I decided to stay in Paris. I signed up for a class at the Sorbonne to learn French and then I continued with my studies in pure mathematics. My flatmate was from a theater background and was studying cinema, and I was also trying to pass the exam to get into film school, but I didn’t get in. My family convinced me that the best thing to do was to finish my math studies so that I would have a way to make a living. Back then, if you had a bachelor’s in math, it was quite easy to become a high school teacher. That's what I did for several years.
on her early work in film
My flatmate was an assistant on the movie Valmont. She knew I wanted to get into the film field, and one day she told me that one of the main actors needed a tutor to give him math lessons. He was barely 17. I contacted the company. So, the first job I ever got in cinema, funnily enough, was as a math teacher for one of the actors. And I started building from there. And then I was an Assistant Director on a film by an American filmmaker called David Jacobson. It was his first film. Nobody was paid. I didn’t know anything about being an AD, but they were looking for people who wanted to work and learn. So, I went to New York for a full summer to work on that, which was crazy. I believed, and I still believe, that whenever you want to do something, you learn it. The will – that's the most important thing. I was confident that I could make it by just learning on the spot, and that's what I did. And after that film, I had some concrete experience of how things work on a set.
I had already done some photography exhibitions in Paris and a group show in India. Back then, I did black-and-white street photography. A friend of mine, another photographer, showed me how to make prints. I was trying to gain new experiences and make my way.
on meeting her partner
He's an Iranian; an exile, like me. We had friends in common, so we’d met each other, but it took us 10 years before we decided to settle down together. In those 10 years, we were just friends, and we’d see each other around sometimes. He's a writer and I liked his writing from the beginning, and he was also into photography. We shared a dark room with some other friends. It was a culmination of many small things — you come to my screening, I read your book, and then we discuss, and then we talk about mutual projects. There was a big buildup.
on her first film
Gradually, I ended up with my first documentary project, which I shot between Iran and France. That was the first time I went back to Iran to make a film, and I went because it was about identity and exile for Iranians who cannot go back. I interviewed them here in Paris and they described their homes in Iran that they had left behind, and I went back and went to those places and filmed them with the descriptions they had given me. I filmed those places through their eyes. The film is called The World Is My Home.
It took a couple of years of research and shooting, and by that time I was living with my partner, and I was pregnant. Right after the film was finished, I had my daughter.
on quitting teaching
When I did my first documentary, I gave up teaching. It was not easy because you always think, what if things don't work out? But luckily, France has a system for supporting artists. If you qualify, you can work part of the year, and the rest of the year you get support from the government. That helped. And living with my partner and sharing our lives also helped. He was very supportive.
on having a child and a career
I was 34 when I had my daughter. I thought a lot about what it would mean to have a child; I didn't want it to put a stop to my burgeoning career. I told my partner that I needed to travel and that I didn’t want to be tied down by a family. But he was very clear: he told me he would take care of the baby when needed and I could keep traveling. It was funny — while I was pregnant, I applied for a residence at the Villa Medici in Rome. I went there for the final interviews with my big belly. And my partner was like, you’re going to go to Rome right after you have your baby? And I was like, yes, I’ll take the baby, you’ll come with me. But ultimately, I didn’t get in. My daughter, Darya, was born, and when she was nine months old, I went to India to do my second documentary. I took her with me to Bombay. And Javad, my partner, came with. He was able to be flexible with work — he worked in IT, but he had his own company, so he could be flexible. We wanted it, and we made it happen. I’ve actually worked more since Darya was born than I did before. It's a matter of desire. If the desire to be a mother is there and the desire to be creative is strong enough, you can do both.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I got pregnant, and I didn't keep that child because I knew that was too early. I’ve never had any regrets about that unborn child, but ten years later, at the age of 34, I was with the right partner, at the right moment of my life. I knew what I was doing. I remember reading an interview with Doris Lessing, and she was asked how she managed to write so many long books as the mother of five children. And she said that it was because she never surrendered. Whenever they would go to sleep, she would write. You find the time.
on traveling to make documentaries
I went to India because I was interested in the Parsis — Zoroastrians in India descended from Persian who had fled Iran in order not to convert to Islam. That was fascinating to me. I wanted to make something about the whole community, but I ended up meeting this man, Homi D. Sethna, who was a Parsi documentary filmmaker. I fixated on him, and I thought, I'm going to portray his life in a film. I had done research in Yazd in Iran and in the Zoroastrian community in Mumbai, but I ended up focusing on Homi's life. That's the film. It's called Homi D. Sethna, Filmmaker.
I won several awards for that film, including one at Cinéma du Réel in Paris, by which time I was already back in Iran filming another documentary. That one was about the firemen of Tehran. I was the first and only woman who got the permission to go into the fire brigade. I went to the ministry and the fire department and I explained my project and I promised that I would not be invasive — it was during Khatami's first mandate, so things were opening up a bit, and the film was not a polemic film. I would go on missions with them and film them during their missions. I was filming, doing sound, everything — a one-woman shoot. I used a Handicam and I had a headset fitted with the DATS recorder and stereo microphones so I could listen and record sound at the same time while shooting. And that was that film I edited myself, as well. I did it all by myself.
on experimenting with fiction
After the documentary about the firemen, I did The Journey of Maryam. That was a docudrama. I played Maryam, a girl who came back to Iran from Paris to look for her father. I kept showing people a photo — a picture of my uncle actually — and saying that this was my father, and I was looking for him. And from there, all these stories unfolded on the streets, so it still kind of had a documentary setup. By that point, I had written my first feature, Dreams of Dust, and I started working on that next. That was fiction, and it was shot on 35 millimeter with a full crew, actors, all of it. It took a couple of months of prep and a month of shooting. I didn’t take my Darya with me when I shot Dreams of Dust because it was too intense. That was the first time we were separated. It wasn't easy, but I knew I could rely on my partner, Darya’s father, and she was a great baby — very open, flexible, and curious.
on giving her daughter a persian education
I took Darya with me when I was shooting The Journey of Maryam in Iran, my mother and my sister helped me take care of her. I wanted her to have a connection to Iranian culture. I took her to Iran as much as possible during her childhood; I even signed her up for kindergarten for short periods. She started learning French and Persian at the same time. I had that experience myself when I was a child — for some reason, I was in a kindergarten in Tehran where they used to teach you English along with Persian. So, I had that bilingual experience myself. I used to give her lessons myself. Every day we had classes at home, and she would run away because she was a child. I believed she had to get that education — to have the cultural and linguistic background. Years later, she told me she was glad that I taught her, even though she used to resist as a child. Now, she speaks, reads, and writes Persian. It's amazing. I'm very proud of that.
My daughter is 25 now. We take time to travel together or be at home together and we share things. We share a lot in terms of creative output. She and her father are my first viewers and readers, and I am the same for them. She actually made the poster for the film I’m just finishing now.
on her interest in exile and communication
The experience of exile has been central to my life ever since I left Iran, but when I think back, it starts before that. This wasn’t something I consciously recognized until recently. My grandfather, my father’s father, was an Afghan, from Herat, and his parents brought him to Iran as a child. His family were merchants, so the didn’t suffer from material lacks, but he had this experience of exile as a child. Afghans were in their own community in Iran. He spoke Persian but with an accent.
When I was five, I was in kindergarten in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood in Tehran, at this school where they taught us English and Persian. The first week of school, I asked one of the kids for a pencil sharpener and the other kids started laughing at me. I realized I had used a word that meant pencil sharpener in my family, but it was a word that was unknown to them. It was not English, it was Persian, but it was not the Persian they knew. That was the first time that I realized that my experience — my family’s experience — was slightly different than the other kids. It was my first experience of alienation. After that, I started digging into my family’s past and learning about his experience of exile. I think my interest in languages, my desire to excel in language-learning, also comes from that experience. Because language is a means of communication with the rest of the world. I didn’t make the conscious connection until later, but looking back, I think that’s why I was so keen on learning new languages. It shows that I’m capable of adapting to anything. It doesn't mean that I lose my roots. I know who I am, I know where I come from.
on what she looks for in her subjects
With my documentaries, it’s always a matter of identity. I look for people who are different, who are slightly marginal, or who have a strong identity. It's always about finding a strong human connection, and then I build on that. In 2012, I made a documentary in Greece about a woman who was involved in the Greek Civil War. In the early ‘40s, she took a gun and fought in the Greek mountains. She was a Communist, and yet, she was religious. There’s this paradox with Greeks who are left-wing and yet have this orthodoxy somewhere in their minds. It’s a strange combination, and she had a strong character that fascinated me. So, I did a documentary about her and her son. He was an artist, but he was doing commercials — a yuppie, a totally different vibe than his mother with her social and political beliefs. I was fascinated by that combination.
I did another film, called Every War is the Same, and one of the main parts of the film is made up of images that I shot in Sarajevo. While I was there, I was passing by a tailor’s shop — I love people who work with their hands, and I also love having clothes made for me or mending my clothes in a city I'm passing through. So, I went in there and I asked her to mend my pants. She was like, “What? Then you won’t have anything to wear.” Then I told her I wanted to go to my hotel and bring my camera because I wanted to film her and ask her some questions about the way she worked. I do not speak Bosnian, and she didn't speak English, but we could both speak German, so we were communicating in German, and I started filming her while she was mending my pants. And that became part of this documentary. It's always about the magic of an encounter with somebody. It’s about connection. I like to work as a mirror for the viewers, taking them on a journey as I dig deep with these peculiar personalities. I want to convey emotion, curiosity, energy, intimacy.
“Sometimes I wish I were more careless. I have the will to go and explore a new field or take on a new project but sometimes in retrospect I wish I’d been freer in my approach. Perhaps that comes from my strict upbringing in Iran and as a woman. ”
on discovering parallels between athens and iran
My first real experience with Athens was in 2010. In 2012, I shot the documentary I mentioned before in Amfissa, which is in central Greece. And then my film Red Rose was shot inside in Athens, and after that, I Will Cross Tomorrow was shot partially in Athens, partially on Lesbos. It is a film that talks about alterity, the Greek crisis, and the influx of migrants. Around 2014 or 2015 I decided I wanted to have my own place in Athens.
I’m in Athens as often as I can be; I like to stay there and write. It reminds me of Tehran — certain neighborhoods, especially in central Athens, with their buildings from the ‘50s and ‘60s, look very similar. The people also have a similar mentality, and the light is similar because both cities are on the slope of a mountain. We have hills in Paris as well, but it's not the same. You feel it more in Athens. What I love about Athens is that it's one of the last cities in Europe with a kind of wild energy, that reminds me of West Berlin in the 80's, before the reunification. It was an island, and so is Athens, for now, until this wildness is eventually washed away by the global wave of gentrification and normalization. So far, Athens has resisted this pretty well. Let's hope it will last a while longer. When I'm there, I'll walk from Politecnico – that's the university where the ’74 student uprising against the junta started. It’s next to the archaeological museum. I’ll walk from there to Lofos Strefi, one of my favorite hills. Athens is full of narenj trees — it’s not a lemon, it’s not an orange, it’s more like a wild orange, and we’re very fond of them in Iran. So I usually pick a couple of the narenj and go up the hill and watch the sunset.
on her writing routine
Sometimes I write better in cafés. In Athens, I have my cafés — in Exarcheia, historically the hangout place for the anarchists, there is a square that has been dismantled by the right-wing government to make a metro, there's a coffee shop I like that’s still there. I go there very early in the morning to write. But I also like writing at home. It depends on the project, my mood, the light, the sound. If the coffee shop is too noisy, then I go work at home.
on her latest film
Of course, October 7th was a shock for all of us. It was a horrible moment because many innocent people were killed in the attacks. But what unfolded afterward was just unbelievable in terms of the violence and the loss of humanity. At the time, I was going around the world touring my animated film, The Siren. I was going from one city to another, watching the news in hotels, and I went crazy seeing the civilian losses and all the biased news. I would watch the French news and then travel somewhere else, and I would see CNN, and then I would watch Al Jazeera, it all depended on where I was, and the treatment of events was so different. Of course, media is often biased. I know that you cannot trust most of the media. But the rendering of the events in Gaza this past year and a half was so unbalanced that I felt wounded by what I was seeing. I would think, how is it that for the same sequence of events, we get such different renderings? So, I decided I would go find out about it myself, and that’s how this film started. It’s a documentary about Gaza.
I tried to go to Gaza, but the roads were blocked. So, I went to Cairo. Palestinian refugees who were just arriving from Gaza, and through one of them, I met a young photographer who's still in north Gaza. Her photography is amazingly powerful. She's so young and yet so adamant about her work and about resisting in Gaza. We started connecting on WhatsApp and doing video calls, and I started filming them. Since April 2024, we have had an almost daily routine of filming, talking, and exchanging messages. It was crucial for me to know what Palestinians in Gaza were going through. The film is what she showed to me through her camera, the images she sent me, and my life around that.
on the importance of openness
I like new experiences, learning things, and meeting people, and I also like my routine and being alone — totally contradictory vibes and moods, but I like them both. I love when I go back to a place, and somebody remembers me. Like in Athens, I go back after six months and I'm passing by a shop, and somebody says, “Oh, hi, how are you doing? Come in!” With the global mood now, and all these conflicts and restrictions and the proto-fascist movements growing in different countries, I think we're losing a lot in terms of spontaneity and openness. I think we're becoming too wary. It's good to believe in human beings and humanity. It’s good to keep that trust.
on working on multiple projects
I'm always working. If I’m not working on anything, I feel mentally blocked. I prefer to work on more than one thing — while I’m working on one thing, part of my mind is working on creating something else. It’s very hectic. I'm a hyperactive person. I wasn’t as a child, I was almost lazy, but somehow this momentum built in me. People often ask if I ever have a moment where I can calm down, but I have fewer and fewer of those moments. I mean, why stop doing things? Sometimes I do feel tired but I think working, creating, and learning gives me a lot of energy.
on pushing past obstacles
It energizes me if people tell me something can’t happen or it’s too late. Trying to go beyond obstacles is something that really pushes me to work. I love being challenged. And that’s important because if you tell someone you want to make a film, they will tell you it’s not possible. You won’t get permission. I say, don't give me permission! I’ll do it anyway. When I said I was going to go to Rafah and to Cairo, everyone said it was crazy, it was dangerous, I wouldn’t be allowed to make the film. And I was like, we’ll see. So, this film is a miracle, but it's always like that. If you listen to all the reasons not to do something, you will never do anything. I never believed that I couldn’t do something. I always think, if I want it, I’ll do it. I'm not saying that I've always succeeded in going beyond the challenges, but I try, at least. A couple of years ago, I was in Greece, and I heard through a friend of mine that there was a group going on a climbing trip. I had never climbed mountains, but I decided to do it. I was almost the oldest in the group and I had the least experience in mountain climbing, but I made it because I really wanted to. Or making an animated movie – I do not draw. It was extremely challenging to make The Siren, which is a full feature animation, without making animated shorts first or anything. But I just went for it. It took me eight years, but if you believe in yourself, if you're sincere, you can do it.
“Everybody wants to do the same thing at the same time as everybody else and dress up the same way and go to the same cafés and drink the same coffee from the same brand, but then you end up living in a world where it feels like being in a supermarket. Everything has become too clinical and pasteurized and clean in most parts of the world. We have to fight in order to remain wild animals.”
on mastering art with age
I had a friend who was a musician. He passed away a long time ago now. He played the kamancheh. When we met, he was around 40, and he said that it was with age that he came to master his art. It was with age that he came to feel at one with his instrument and with traditional Iranian music. He said Persian music required an aging process; very young musicians were never really very good at it, and with age and experience, he became more aware of his capabilities and his strong points. I think filmmaking is like that, and all the creative processes are like that. Of course, you can make masterpieces when you're very young, but I think what is interesting is watching how people grow in their careers and their lives. There are accidents in every life, but life is like a tree — a branch might break, but another one will grow. There is a harmony to that, a wildness to being natural and unique.
on filling her home with things from her life
I saw this place on the internet and I knew I wanted it. It had this amazing structure. And this table was here when we visited. Everything else is from my life. That carpet was my father's. Some of the books come from Iran. There are things from my trips to India. My plants are very important to me. For furniture, ‘60s and ‘70s European designs are my favorite.
The piece upstairs is by Reza Abedini. He’s a good friend and an amazing graphic designer. He did posters for many of my films, and that piece is a study for one of the posters he made for me for Dreams of Dust. The one over the couch is by a painter I discovered in a gallery in the 20th arrondissement— I was riding my bike downhill, and I passed by the gallery and I saw her work, so I stopped and went in and started looking at the paintings and I ended up choosing this one.
on style, beauty, and keeping her own image
Usually, I don't like going by brands, but if I find a brand that I like, I stick to it. For years, I was buying Marithé François Girbaud, which no longer exists. My daughter just gifted me a vintage Girbaud outfit she found. I buy a lot of vintage. And then when I travel, I seek out local designers. This jacket is from a Greek designer called VOID. It’s two brothers who have been working together for some time now; they’re based in Athens, and they have a little factory. This dress is from S Deer, a Chinese designer; they have a shop in Paris. They are peculiar garments, which is what I like. This bag is from Amsterdam, and it’s made of the rubber from a car tire. And then my glasses — I like wearing glasses that make a statement. I usually get them from Factory 900.
I like natural products, but I don’t care about the brands. When I travel, I always try to find some local products and bring them home with me. It extends the experience of that trip. I buy a lot of essential oils and spices, and creams when I'm traveling in India. And the Greek products are good. But I don't have a consistent routine. I use something and then I get sick of that. I like experiencing new things, so I keep trying different stuff.
For instance, for fragrance, I've been wearing Féminité Du Bois for ages, but I also have other fragrances, which I buy in Morocco and India. I also like to make my own mixes. It's like alchemy. I like playing around with flavors, tastes, fragrances, clothes. Perhaps that's the ultimate freedom — not being a categorized consumer robot that has to have this brand bag and that brand shoe. Two people never dress exactly the same because you will wear your pullover in a certain way, combining it with a t-shirt, or a scarf, or a coat, that’s different from the way someone else would wear it. That's the beauty of it.
I admire people who change their hair color, go blonde, go brunette, go red. Or tattooing is a big thing now, and I like it, even though I would never do a tattoo myself. I think I have an almost religious approach to my body. I like being myself, keeping my own image. It's my persona. I think of it like a tree that is not trimmed. The natural growth of a plant is always more beautiful than any kind of trimming.
on books she recommends
More Than A Casual Contact by Jeremy Cronin — somehow, my political experience as an Iranian, especially of my generation, though worlds apart, is similar to Corbin’s in South Africa and the struggle against Apartheid. I made a short film based on the introduction to this book years ago. I was in Durban in 2010 or so, and it was like being back to a taxi in Tehran, my city, which, since 2009, I can’t go back to.
I also recommend Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges; Poèmes épars et fragments by Anna Akhmatova; A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir; and Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.
sephideh’s favorite spots in paris and athens
In Paris, I love the Jourdain neighborhood — it’s just down the hill from me. There’s a coffee shop there that I like, where I wrote the script for I Will Cross Tomorrow. My favorite bookstores are Librairie de l’Atelier, Le monte en l’air, and La croisée des Mondes. For vintage clothing, I like Gloria, and for furniture, I like Maison Nordik and Bindies.
In Athens, my favorite bookstores are Lexikopoleio and Météores. The central market of Athens is also very nice and there’s a very tiny, shabby restaurant called Diporto that I discovered. It's below ground level, one floor down. It's very old. I found it when we were doing night shoots on Red Rose. I would sleep on set, get up at around noon, and then go down there directly to eat something, and then go back to work for the next night shoot. I still go there.
