Tina Gharavi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tina Gharavi is an Iranian/American filmmaker and screenwriter. Gharavi, is known for making innovative films about outsiders, outcasts and marginalised people in extraordinary situations. Best known for her work on diversity, her subjects include migration, terrorism-related discrimination, Muslim-identity, and issues related to representation. Gharavi's award-winning films have been shown in film festivals internationally, broadcast on television worldwide on the BBC, Channel 4 (UK), ITV, Showtime, Educational Broadcasting System South Korea, and in the contemporary art world, including multiple screenings at the ICA in London, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (UK) and the Sundance Film Festival.

She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship at Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY and in 2003, a UK Arts Council Decibel Spotlight Award. Her works are housed in the permanent collections of MIT, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, British Film Institute, Harvard University Library, Manchester Art Gallery, and the Donnell Library NY amongst many others.

1 Personal life
2 Expanding the Boundaries of Documentary
3 Innovative Practice
4 Filmography
5 External links
6 Articles

[edit] Personal life

Gharavi was born in Iran in 1972. Because of the Revolution in Iran she was sent to live in the UK, moved to New Zealand and eventually settled in the US. Gharavi attended High School in Middletown, New Jersey during which she was selected to participate in Governor's School of New Jersey, a scholarship program for artistically or academically talented high school students. She attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and was a Henry Rutgers Scholar supervised by both visual artist Martha Rosler and cinema historian John Belton. In 1999, she was invited as an artist to Le Fresnoy, Studio Nationale Des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France) where she also worked with filmmaker Robert Kramer.

Gharavi is currently on the teaching staff at the University of Newcastle and is frequently a guest lecturer internationally. She lives and works in South Shields and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

[edit] Expanding the Boundaries of Documentary

Gharavi’s work explores the veracity of the image and combines intriguing improvisational and dramatic work as a way of developing new storytelling languages.

Sundance programmer Shari Frilot, commenting on Gharavi’s Closer (2000):

“

...it takes documentary to the next level.^[1]

”

and The London Evening Standard commenting about Mother/Country:

“

...This documentary alone justifies the Alt-TV Strand.^[1]

”

[edit] Closer (2000)

This stunningly shot experimental documentary has at its heart a poignant character study of a 17 year-old lesbian living in Newcastle, England. Closer, an official selection at Sundance Film Festival 2001, innovatively explores the process of documentary filmmaking and boldly challenges traditional forms of storytelling. Fiction and documentary collide in this gripping film as ‘scenes’ from the main subject's life are re-enacted for the camera. Produced without a script and in close collaboration with the subject, Annelise Rodger, the filmmaker presents a hypnotising array of montages and fictive sequences to introduce the day-to-day happenings of this extraordinary person. From the streets of Newcastle - where we find Annelise speaking frankly to the camera about her experiences as a young lesbian - to the emotionally charged re-enactment of her coming out to her mother, this inventive film provides a rare auto-portrait. What emerges is a remarkable encounter with a young woman, and a story that has broader implications about being young, being at the cusp of adulthood, and finding one's identity; about how documentaries reveal, provoke and conceal.

Official selection, Sundance Film Festival. In distribution with Women Make Movies (New York), screened on Showtime/Sundance Channel in the US.

Grand Prize: i/Film Planetout Short Movie Award (Los Angeles, OutFEST)

Award: One World Film Festival, The Czech Radio Award Jury statement announced by Jiří Hubička:

“

The jury agreed that within the collection of documentaries, the film Closer is a work of great creativity. The director uses with amazing sensitivity a large scale of real sounds and music of different types and genres (electronic, techno, modern artificial music) to underline the distinct and meaningful changes in the atmosphere. The manipulation of authentic sound almost to the extent that there is total silence is particularly compelling in the central scene of the film in which there is an intimate discussion between mother and daughter. The use of sound exponentiates the message of the film, which is a testimony about an uneasy way to find one_s identity, and the ability to overcome prejudices set by generational differences and other barriers.^[1]

”

In 2000 Tina setup and established the Kooch Cinema Group i-Kooch website, a community media training project, which is made up of asylum seekers and refugee participants from the Middle East based in the North of England.

She started this project after returning to Iran to make a Channel Four commissioned documentary, Mother/Country, about revisiting her mothers house 23 years after leaving.

[edit] Mother/Country (2001)

Channel Four commissioned TV documentary. Over 20 years ago, at the age of six, director Tina Gharavi left Iran and her mother, to live with her father in the West. She has not seen mother or homeland since. This intensely personal film follows her as she returns to Iran to confront her past and understand why her mother sent her away. As well as filming her own experiences, Tina employs actors to play out the roles of her and her mother as they look on, in order to facilitate communication between the pair. But as the visit draws to a close, her mother remains elusive about why she sent her away, while Tina has a bombshell of her own to drop. Grand Prize: Tongues on Fire, Asian Women’s’ Film Festival, ICA London March 2005

Along with several other newspapers, TimeOut selected Mother/Country as ‘Pick of the Week’ and called it ‘genuinely moving.’

In 2001 she was awarded a prestigious US National Endowment for the Arts residency at Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY where she completed A Town Like Lackawanna, a film about a Muslim/European immigrant community in America post-9/11.

[edit] A Town Like Lackawanna (2002)

A timely observational documentary focusing on the attitudes of two distinct groups of men- American-Muslims from the Yemeni community and those from white European backgrounds- who once worked in the former steel mining industry in Lackawanna, NY. The film records these two groups of men talking about the changes in their communities and the shift in attitudes since 9/11 following the arrest and trial of the Lackawanna 6. The film challenges traditional methodology of documentary storytelling and presents a unique anthropology of a particular time and place. Commissioned as part of a prestigious residency program sponsored by the NEA.

Through her company, Bridge + Tunnel Productions, Gharavi produced a documentary about the first settled Muslim community in the UK- the Yemeni Community in South Shields and the day Mohammad Ali got married in the local mosque The King of South Shields.

[edit] The King of South Shields (2008)

Documentary looking at the day that Mohammad Ali came to Tyneside in 1977. Ali and his new wife Veronica, attended the South Shields Mosque with their baby daughter Hana, and had their wedding blessed by the local Imam. Using archive news and Super-8 footage, much of it never seen before, the film looks at the effect that the event had on the young Yemeni-British men who attended the blessing. The Yemeni community in South Shields is one of the oldest Muslim communities in the UK, and this film examines the emerging Arab/British identity, during a period when the young men involved were recognising the duality of their culture. The visit of Mohammed Ali, as probably the highest profile Muslim in the world, has increased significance today as the men reflect on the events of the past. Official Film Site

[edit] Innovative Practice

In 1998 Tina set up the productions company, Bridge + Tunnel Productions. In 2005, she established a separate media education charity, Nomad Cultural Forum, to undertake the charitable and educational work she initiated mainly working with refugees and asylum seekers (the Kooch Cinema Projects). In 2008, the name was changed to Bridge + Tunnel Voices.

Gharavi has recently been awarded a major UK Heritage Lottery Fund award for an exhibition (documentary, oral history and community photographic project) about multi-culturalism and the Yemeni-Muslim community (who have lived in the North East since 1890), Last of the Dictionary Men. This is a major touring exhibition that will launch at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in 2008.

Her recent commission from Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, Asylum Carwash, is an 8-hour installation documentary film project about the existence of modern day slavery and the reality of black market economics for failed asylum seekers in Europe. Touring the UK in 2007-8, the project was launched by acclaimed Malawian poet and former political prisoner, Jack Mapanje, and was commemorated in poem entitled: Upon Opening Tina’s ‘Asylum Carwash’ Poem

Gharavi recently was winner of the TCM Classic Movie Award for Perfect to Begin which she produced with Richard Lawson.

Gharavi has also recently completed a feature screenplay, Ali in Wonderland, about teenage Iranian refugees in the North East (naturally, a comedy), developed through improvisation with the Kooch group and more recently developed with young people as part of the Wiki: Wonderland project.

[edit] Filmography

The King of South Shields (2008) — director, producer, photographer
Last of the Dictionary Men (2007) — director, producer
Perfect to Begin (2007) — script editor, producer
Two Lighthouses (2007) — director, producer
Bread: Nearest Neighbor: Israel & Palestine (2006) — director, producer
Featherhead (2004) — director, producer
A Town Like Lackawanna (2002) — director, producer
Mother/Country (2001) — director, producer
Closer (2000) — director, producer
Panino (1999) — script editor, producer
If I Wasn’t a Painter, I Would Have Raised Chickens (1995) — director, producer