Maryam Keshavarz, writer/director of The Persian Version said she’d finished up her highly personal rollicking family comedy with only days to spare before its Sundance premiere last night. T…
said she’d finished up her highly personal rollicking family comedy with only days to spare before its Sundance premiere last night. The audience loved what they saw with standing ovation amid music and dancing for the film about an extended Iranian family in New York.
“I always wanted to do a comedy. I thought, what can I do a comedy about? My own family is pretty horrifying, and hilarious,” said Keshavarz who stopped by Deadline’s Sundance Studio with Leila Mohammadi, Nouisha Noor and Bella Warda who play three generations of Iranian women. They clash and come together in universal story that’s tied closely to the immigrant experience. The film was purposefully joyful, she said, duing a particularly dark period.
Comedy was a refuge from darkness in both places. “When Trump took office, I felt a seismic shift…[He] really fanned the flames of the anti-Muslim sentiment. When the Muslim Ban first took effect, my family was directly affected. So I started writingas a mental refuge, a counterpoint to all the hateful political rhetoric happening.”
“I wanted the spirit of comedy to draw in the audience – perhaps because I desperately needed to laugh.” Of the ongoing women-led civil unrest in Iran, she said, “Women have been fighting back in so many different ways. Now it’s coming to a head and the international community has seen that. I want that to be portrayed in all my work. But what’s so important to emphasize is is that… no matter what’s going on, with the crackdown and the protests, no regime can extinguish joy. That’s what I thought in the era that I wrote, and it’s more resonant now.
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