Fatherland
Short film Completed 2007
Director
Taghi Amirani
Doc Society helped with
Production
Fatherland tells the story of the filmmaker's late father's extraordinary double life pre- and post-Iranian Revolution. The film is set against a huge historical canvas covering tumultuous events, both political and personal.
Crew
Taghi Amirani
Director
Taghi Amirani was born in Iran. He read physics at Nottingham University where for his final year project instead of doing something in the lab he made Shades of Black, a documentary about an imaginary journey into a black hole. While at film school in Bristol, he made Mechanics of Love, a lame homage to Buster Keaton via Woody Allen. The film landed him his first TV job researching design and technology programmes.
In 1989 he produced and directed Earth Calling Basingstoke for Channel 4's flagship science series Equinox. Basingstoke, about the extraterrestrial lives of amateur astronomers, launched him as a documentary maker.
He has since made 35 films, two fiction shorts and a few commercials. The docs include Vegetable Plots shot on a London allotment for C4's True Stories, and The Dispossessed for BBC2, shot in Afghanistan in a Taliban-controlled refugee camp. His most recent film is Red Lines and Deadlines, a PBS Wide Angle documentary on Shargh, Iran's leading reformist newspaper.
