“Heiran” portrays the story of a young rural girl in war stricken Iran, who falls in love with a gallant Afghan refugee. Even though a drama, Shalizeh Arefpour, the director, has used real footage of illegal immigrants and refugee camps to depict how Afghans’ rights are being trampled, and mirrors this with the treatment of women in Iran.
Color, 35 mm, 1:1/85, 88 min, 2009, Iran / English Subtitle
Production of Cinema 79 Co.
First theatrical release in North America by Parastoo Film (http://www.parastoofilm.com)
Scriptwriters: Shalizeh Arefpour, Naghmeh Samini
Director of Photography: Hossein Jafarian
Executive Producer: Nava Rohani
Producers: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Jahangir Kosari
Cast: Baran Kosari, Mehrdad Sedighian, Farhad Aslani, Zhaleh Sameti, Fouzhan Arefpour, Mohsen Mokari, Khosro Shakibaei (this was the legendary Shakibaei's last film)
Director: Shalizeh Arefpour
Shalizeh Arefpour was born in Tehran in 1970. She graduated from the Filmmaking Training Center. In 1990 she started her cinematic career as script supervisor and has since cooperated with many cinema and TV filmmakers, such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohammad Reza Honarmand, in 26 movies as programmer, assistant director, screenwriter and editor. She landed her directorial debut in 2004 in the short "The Shadow of the Moon". Heiran is her first feature film for which she is also the screenwriter.
