DIRECTORS
MIRIAM CARLSEN
DIRECTOR
Miriam Carlsen grew up in a globetrotter family, with a dad specializing in sustainable energy solutions for Third World countries. Traveling and hosting people from all national and ethnically backgrounds, has shaped her passion for human narratives and their impact on cultural bridge building. She worked in Norway in the organization RAMP, an NGO for integrating team building and guidance for orphanage refugee minors from Iraq and Afghanistan. It led to an increased interest for a deeper understanding of human life in the MENA region and interest in the Afghan matter. Later on, she learned Arabic and lived in the Middle East.
Since then, she has lived in Taiwan, Lebanon and Turkey and furthermore spend a good deal of her life, traveling the Globe. The last couple of years, she worked as an international television reporter in Istanbul. However, she missed the human faces and in-depth coverage in the news feeds and the more personal story telling. When she came up with the idea for making this documentary film, she left her corporate life to pursue the privilege of being fully in charge of creative decision-making and the production process.
Except for a few courses in film production, she is autodidact in film creation, driven by an interest in visual story telling and social relations. With a background in Social Anthropology, she has lived and worked with cultural dissemination and film languages in Taiwan, Lebanon and Turkey.
SAED MAYAHY
DIRECTOR
Saeed Mayahy is an Iranian film director born in 1991 in Bushehr. He graduated from Bushehr Film School in 2013, where he debuted in with the documentary “The Camera” in 2012.
His documentary film Finish Line (2019), tells the story of a young female athlete in Iran. After a break due to a serious accident, she is fighting to return to her field, but is faced with huge complications from the outside world, as she does not comply to wear a hijab, while competing in international matches.
In Don’t Worry Be Happy, an underground Erotic Illustrator in Iran. As he experiences his art achieve a sudden internationally popularity from the outside world, it is still prohibited within his own country. Domestically, discovered by authorities, he is caught by Iranian police and is accused by The Law of Islamic Ethics for making these illustrations.
Common for Saeed Mayahy’s films, is that he uses the film media in all of them, to explore and depict the hidden as well as visible boundaries found in society. The paradoxical distinctions which emerges between life in private and public spheres, and the inevitable enmeshment of individual identity between those contradicting forces.
In June 2021 the two begun their collaboration on “Transformation”