Azita Damandan

Azita Damandan is an Iranian-Australian writer, director, and producer with over thirty years of experience in cinema across Iran and Australia. A multi-award-winning filmmaker, Azita began her creative journey writing short stories published in major Iranian newspapers before transitioning to film, where she quickly made a name for herself as a self-taught director. Her early short films-including Archives, Alley, Neighbour, and Woman, Man, Child-earned national acclaim, with Neighbour screening in Berlin and Woman, Man, Child winning Best Director at Iran's First Women Filmmakers' Festival. Azita also worked as First Assistant Director alongside renowned directors such as two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi. After immigrating to Australia in 2006, she founded Red Geranium Productions and rebuilt her career from scratch, producing over eight award-winning short films including Lullaby, Silence, Untold, and Unseen. In 2023, she completed her first feature film Mourners-a poetic anthology exploring the quiet trauma of life under dictatorship-which has won multiple international awards and is distributed by Amazon Prime and Sony Pictures. She is currently developing two new feature films: A for Aleph, a semi-biographical and politically resonant story interweaving the literary legacy of Iranian writer Houshang Golshiri with the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement; and She Was There, Too, a haunting mystery-drama exploring fractured memory, love, and exile.