YAHOO: Jasmin Mozaffari's short film 'Motherland,' set amid 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, wins TIFF award
Filmmaker Jasmin Mozaffari ended the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on Sunday with her short film Motherland named the best Canadian film in the festival's Short Cuts program.
Motherland is a captivating story set around the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, when a man named Babak (Behtash Fazlali) goes to meet his fiancée's parents and must face the harsh reality of what it means to be an Iranian immigrant.
The idea for Motherland came from a personal place, based on the story of her parents.
"My dad came from Iran in late '78, '79 to the U.S.," Mozaffari explained to Yahoo Canada. "So it was a very tumultuous time for my father and then eventually he left and came to Canada, ... partly because there was so much threat to Iranian people on the ground in the U.S. during this time."
"They were facing threats of deportation. They were getting assaulted. The FBI was raiding their dorms. My film just touches on a very small part of all the chaos that was happening for them. ... But my mom, ... her parents wouldn't speak to my mom for two years when they realized she was marrying an Iranian person. So there's all this to draw upon from that was the inspiration."
Mozaffari added that as an Iranian-Canadian filmmaker, she's aware that there isn't a lot of representation in North American films.
"Iranian films are amazing, ... but in terms of what stories affect us on the ground here, there's not a lot yet," Mozaffari said. "So I wanted to make a film that had representation about us that wasn't from the same perspective Ben Affleck took when he made Argo."
"I wanted to make a film by Iranians, for Iranians, and also for Canadians and North Americans to realize this is what happened."