World press on Tina Gharavi's 'I Am Nasrine' (January 13, 2013)

The Guardian published an article by Jason Solomon's devoted to Tina Gharavi's movie. "Perhaps the biggest surprise of last week's nominations flood came in the Bafta list for outstanding British debut category. Alongside heralded films such as The Imposter was I Am Nasrine, which had not premiered at Sundance or Cannes, the LFF or even Edinburgh, but at the Berwick film and media arts festival," the article begins.

"I haven't spoken to anyone who'd even heard of the film prior to its nomination, though it did have a limited release in the north east, where its director, Tina Gharavi, resides and where it is partly set. So I tracked Gharavi down and spoke to her, just after she'd finished a call with the ever-voracious Weinstein Company, it turns out."

"The film is about an Iranian woman who flees Tehran and finds herself smuggled to a rather bleak Tyneside. Gharavi herself was born in Iran and fled, aged six, with her family during the 1979 revolution, which is of course depicted in this year's somewhat more garlanded film Argo. She came first to Loughborough in the UK and then to New Jersey in the US, and now, via a stint in New Zealand, lives in Newcastle (she must be the only person to understand both reality TV shows Jersey Shore and Geordie Shore). She told me part of I Am Nasrine was shot clandestinely in Iran, with Gharavi and her tiny crew pretending they were the second unit on another feature being shot there, a real-life echo of the incredible scenario behind Ben Affleck's Argo. "So much of that movie is wrong that I just laughed at it," says Gharavi."