Sepideh Farsi

Sepideh Farsi (Persian: سپیده فارسی) is an Iranian filmmaker, born in 1965 in Tehran.

Born in 1965 in Tehran, to a father working in civil engineering and an unemployed mother, Sepideh Farsi participated in numerous demonstrations and photographed them. She was arrested at the age of 16 for hiding a political dissident and imprisoned for eight months in Machad. Upon her release, she was banned from university and went into exile in France.

She arrived in Paris in 1984 and studied mathematics. At 19, she was ultimately more drawn to the visual arts. She began creating photographs before making her first short films. One of her first films was a documentary about the Iranian diaspora, The World Is My Home. She continued her work in 2000 with a portrait of an Indian filmmaker, simply titled Homi D. Sethna, Film-maker, which received the FIPRESCI Prize at the Bombay Film Festival. In 2001, she directed Men of Fire, a work of fiction devoted to the Tehran firefighters. In 2003, she directed a work of fiction on the theme of identity, Maryam’s Journey, a film somewhere between fiction and reportage that follows the journey of a young Iranian woman living in Paris who returns to search for her father in the streets of Tehran. With a yellowed photo in hand, she interviews passersby and shopkeepers.

In 2007, she shot a new documentary, Harat. In the spring of 2008, once again wandering around Tehran, she made a film with a cell phone (due to government restrictions on filming). This film depicts various aspects of life in the Iranian capital: taxi drivers, women in a hair salon, young men talking about drugs, an Iranian rapper, and more. In 2009, she was a member of the jury for Best First Film at the Locarno International Film Festival. In 2014, she shot a new fiction film in Greece with Iranian actors; Red Rose broke the taboos of Iranian cinema by including sex scenes and evoking the relationships between the young, protesting generation and the generation that had challenged the Shah’s regime.

In 2025, Sepideh Farsi released the documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” which recounts her year of correspondence with Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was assassinated during an Israeli army raid on April 16, 2025, while she was scheduled to attend the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025.