Growing up in Iran in the 50s and 60s, filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa remembers praying with her mother and experiencing a profound sense of magic underlined by a profound sense of despair. “I would go to mosques with all these mirrors and silver doors and become overwhelmed with the beauty. But then I would see women, including my mother, who cried when they prayed. I could sense their pain in the midst of all this beauty.”
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So she studied business and economics during college in Tehran, but after one course in film production and theory she fell in love with filmmaking. At 23, against the wishes of her conservative father, she went abroad to study at the London Film School for two years. When she came back in 1976 she began working for Iranian National Television, first writing scripts and editing, then producing and directing. She also amassed an archive of documentary footage and photographs of her travels around the country.
Four years into the war she was increasingly frustrated and depressed about the fighting, about her family problems, about her work. She separated from her husband and joined her mother, brother, and sisters in Chicago, where she quickly found work as a film editor. Eventually she got her MFA in filmmaking from the University of Illinois, then took a teaching job at Columbia College.
A Tajik Woman will be screened at the awards ceremony of the Film & Video festival at 7:30 PM on Saturday, September 30, at Kino-Eye Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division. Tickets are $5; call 663-1600, ext. 5434.
