Berkeley Lecture Series Presents 

Film Screening and Discussion with PanteA Bahrami, Director

Film: "BuddingGrief" 

Place: Central Stage, 5221 Central Ave. Richmond, California 94804

Date: Saturday, September 29, 2018 Time: 7:00 pm 

On July 27th, 1988, none of the political prisoners in Iran serving their sentences suspected that during next 6 weeks, their numbers would be significantly diminished. Those who survived would never see their missing cellmates again. This film attempts to document the dawning realization among the inmates that these executions amounted to a campaign to exterminate political prisoners, and to trace, step by step, the puzzle that confronted them during this period, from the memories of 12 survivors. How did the prisoners discover that there was a death commission instead of a parole court? How didIranian men and women fight for their lives and help one another survive by informing one another in secret usingMorse code signals, sometimes with light, sometimes with sound?  With involving some dance pieces for every episode, the film tries to find out an artistic language for one of the biggest government violence in this century?

PanteA Bahrami is an internationally recognized documentary filmmaker with a doctoral degree in Journalism from the University of Dortmund and the Institute of Theatre, Film and Television, Cologne University, Germany. She wrote her Ph.D.dissertation on the subject of “The Feminine Role in Iranian Films: A Comparison of the Identity of Women Before and After the Revolution.”  She has worked as a journalist for Ruhe Welle and WDR (GermanRadio and TV); and asa Producer for  the Persian TV Program, “Ressaneh,” broadcast by Florian TV in Dortmund. She started her work as a documentary film-maker in 1998 and has created 20 documentary films during the past decade, among which are: “Islam: My Identity or the Reason of My Escape,”selected at the 11th Women’s Film Festival Feminale in 2002; “Playing with Fire,”awarded the Erasmus-Euro Media Siegel Prize in 2007; and “From Scream to Scream,”nominated for Julian Bartel Prize in 2007. A former political prisoner who spent four years of her life in the prisons of the Islamic Republic ofIran, her works have been shown at various international film festivals around the world.