Maryam Keshavarz

Maryam Keshavarz is an Iranian-American queer filmmaker known for Circumstance (2011), which depicts the forbidden romance between two young women in contemporary Tehran and won the Audience Award: Dramatic at Sundance. The film -- shot in Lebanon since filming in Iran was impossible -- was banned in Iran, and Keshavarz herself was subsequently barred from returning to the country by Iranian authorities; the film nonetheless reached Iranian audiences widely through pirated copies. She returned to Sundance more than a decade later with The Persian Version (2023), a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about an Iranian-American woman's relationship with her mother, which won both the Audience Award and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and went on to a theatrical release from Sony Pictures Classics. Keshavarz has spoken about making films for and about communities whose lives are criminalized and about the power of storytelling as resistance.