Bani

Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran and immigrated to the USA in 1979. She attended the Film School at the University of Texas at Austin before moving to Paris, France in 1999. She has made short fiction and experimental films as well as feature documentaries. In 2004 she directed TRANSIT, a short fiction that played in a number of international film festivals (Rotterdam, Sao Paulo, Larissa, Brooklyn, Tribeca Underground, Flying Broom Ankara), and which received the Grand Jury Prize at the Premiers Plans Angers Film Festival. The film was nominated for the Jean Vigo Prize and the Prix Novaïs-Terxeira. Also in 2004, she directed SHIRIN EBADI : A simple lawyer, feature documentary commissioned by the French channel ARTE. The film played in many international festivals and on television around the world, and is part of a number of university library collections. Since 2001, Bani has been travelling continuously to Iran, her birth country, working closely with filmmakers there, and establishing a network of Iranian filmmakers that can communicate with each other across borders. From 2002 to 2003, she was artistic director and production liaison between Paris and Tehran on the project, The Other Iran, produced by 8 European television networks and the production company, Article Z. This project consisted of a call for entries to Iranian documentary filmmakers for new, original projects. Among the 104 projects that were submitted, 5 were chosen for production. Along with her colleague, the producer T. Celal, she set up a workshop in Tehran for these directors and then oversaw the different phases of production. In 2006, Bani founded her production company, Pensée Sauvage Films, and has recently produced and directed a feature length documentary about Tehran, A People in the Shadows. She is currently writing her first feature fiction film, EKBATAN, which is scheduled to be shot in 2009. Bani currently lives between New York and Tehran.