‘Shayda’s Noora Niasari On How Her Mother’s “Strength And Resilience In Finding Freedom In Australia” Inspired Her Debut Feature – Contenders International
For Iranian-Australian filmmaker Noora Niasari, her debut feature Shayda has served as an authentic and honest exploration into her own personal childhood trauma. The film, which is being released by Sony Pictures Classics and won the World Cinema Dramatic Competition Audience Award in Sundance earlier this year, is Australia’s Oscar submission for the Best International Feature Oscar.
The film follows Shayda, a brave Iranian mother who finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her 6-year-old daughter. Over Persian New Year, they take solace in Nowruz rituals and new beginnings, but when her estranged husband re-enters their lives, Shayda’s path to freedom is jeopardized.
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It’s anchored by a heart-rendering performance by Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the best actress award in Cannes last year for her role in Holy Spider. Niasari writes, directs and produces with Dirty Films’ Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton and Coco Francini.
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“I was 5 years old when I lived in the women’s shelter with my mother,” Niasari said at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International event, joined on a panel for the movie by Francini. “It’s an experience that really stayed with me and when I became a filmmaker, I knew that I had to tell this story and I had to be the person to tell this story given that I had lived this experience and really been inspired by my mother since that age and her strength and resilience in finding freedom in Australia and giving me all of the opportunities I’ve had.”
Before embarking on the project, Niasari asked her mom to write a memoir, which took her six months to complete. “I was there holding her hand helping her, guiding her on what things to focus on because it was really hard for me to access those memories because obviously I was 5 years old and there was a lot of trauma,” said Niasari. “So it really helped to center the film in my mother’s experience but also allow me to understand all the pieces of our story that I wasn’t aware of.”
“As a mandate for us, it’s about supporting new voices,” said Francini. “Cate [Blanchett] and Andrew [Upton] both being Australian, obviously there was an interest in that. But really it was reading the script and finding the joy that’s in the script, even though it’s dealing with all of these difficult subjects. Noora was able to tell a story that’s about domestic violence, yes, it’s about a mother and daughter, yes, it’s also about immigration and displacement, which is an area we are really interested in showing. We just never had really seen anything that had captured hope in such a difficult situation.”
Check out the panel video above.
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