The Persian Version director Maryam Keshavarz talks about bringing her "sort of true" story to life, and why now is the perfect time for this film.
The Big Picture In her upcoming comedy-drama The Persian Version, director Maryam Keshavarz tackles what it means to be an immigrant and a child of diaspora through the eyes of mother-daughter pair Shireen and Leila . When Leila accidentally gets pregnant after a one-night stand, her already tense relationship with her mother grows even tenser, especially as her large Iranian-American family navigate her father's health crisis as well.
MARYAM KESHAVARZ: It's been amazing. After Sundance, we opened the Munich Film Festival, and it was like this 2,500-person theater, and you just didn't know what to expect because it's very culturally specific to America and to Iran. I was, first of all, blown away by Germans being so emotional. They were, like, laughing and crying, standing ovations. It's an international crowd, obviously, it's a film festival, but the Germans were very moved by it.
I'm going to come back to this idea of culture, but I want to ask, obviously, the 1979 revolution is a fixed point in time in this story, that's kind of like where the whole thing hinges, but the rest of it is kind of a lot more nebulous. It's like the 2000s-ish, the ‘90s-ish. But casting is a major obsession of mine. We found that cast from all over the world, from every country you can imagine. They're all Persian, hyphen-Persians from the Netherlands and the UK, France, and Canada, the US. But I think what was so important to me when we were casting is that we really have a sense of family. And they did so much work together.
She really does. It’s this maturity and gravitas that is way beyond a high school freshman's lived experience, especially in this day and age. KESHAVARZ: Not really. I think what's different about this film is, obviously, I love Iranian cinema so much, it's one of the reasons– I mean, the first female director I ever met was an Iranian woman when I went to the Films from Iran series when I was a student at Northwestern and at the Art Institute of Chicago. I didn't even know women could be directors, honestly. I only knew that the woman who did Big, which was Penny Marshall, was a woman.
KESHAVARZ: I was shocked that anyone wanted to finance this film! I was really shocked about the whole process because I don't think it could have happened maybe 10 years ago that this film would be financed. I really don't think so. But you know, maybe with Crazy Rich Asians, and Lulu did The Farewell, and there were other projects that were coming out. And also, with streaming, the idea is that you don't only want to be an American film, you want to be a global film.
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