He was born in
Baneh, a
Kurdish city in
Iran. His family moved to
Sanandaj in 1981. Ghobadi received a Bachelor of Arts in film directing from
Iran Broadcasting College. After a brief career in industrial photography, Ghobadi began making short
8 mm films. His documentary
Life in Fog won numerous awards. Bahman Ghobadi was assistant director on
Abbas Kiarostami's
The Wind Will Carry Us. Bahman Ghobadi founded Mij Film in 2000, a company with the aim of production of films in Iran about its different ethnic groups. His first feature film was
A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), the first Kurdish film produced in Iran. The film won the
Caméra d'Or at the
Cannes Film Festival. His second feature was
Marooned in Iraq (2002), which brought him the Gold Plaque from the
Chicago International Film Festival. His third feature,
Turtles Can Fly, followed in 2004, winning the Glass Bear and Peace Film Award at the
Berlin International Film Festival and the Golden Shell at the
San Sebastian International Film Festival. In 2006, Ghobadi's
Half Moon won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Iran's renowned actors
Golshifteh Farahani, Hassan Poorshirazi and
Hedyeh Tehrani acted in this movie. The music of the movie was made by Iran's musician
Hossein Alizadeh. The film, which was a collaborative project by Iran, France, Austria and Iraq, was shot fully in Iranian Kurdistan. However, it narrates the story of a group of Iranian Kurdish musicians who would like to travel to
Iraqi Kurdistan and organize a concert there. In 2006,
Index on Censorship gave Ghobadi an Index Film Award for making a significant contribution to freedom of expression through his film
Turtles Can Fly. In May 2009, his film
No One Knows About Persian Cats won an
Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize ex-aequo when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. This film chronicles the hardships facing young Iranian musicians seeking to evade censorship. In 2012, his next film
Rhino Season was released at
San Sebastian Film Festival. In this film he worked with
Monica Belluci and combined an international cast. Following critical success of this film, he also took part as one of the directors in anthology film
Words with Gods directing the segment Kaboki. In 2015, his feature documentary
A Flag without a Country was released. The documentary that premiered at
Sundance Film Festival is about Kurds, middle-east war and "Kurdistan", a nation with about 45m population and still without a country. Following this documentary, he got back on fiction and directed
The Four Walls in which he again assembled an international cast featuring
Amir Aghaee,
Funda Eryiğit and
Denizhan Akbaba. He is currently writing, directing, and producing, and actively participating in supporting human rights and freedom of speech all around the world. ==Filmography==