Ariane Lorrain is a documentary filmmaker born from a Quebecer father and an Iranian mother, who grew up in a multicultural trilingual home. Her approach is close to the traditions of visual anthropology and essay film, privileging the senses and poetry to convey reality’s surrealness. Her work deals with issues of land and identity, cultural passation and collective rituals. Her hybrid background led her to live and create between Montreal and the Middle East. ZAGROS is her first feature, shot within her mother's lineage, the Bakhtiari tribe.
Shahab Mihandoust was born in Tehran shortly after the 1979 revolution. During the massive wave of baby boomers departing the country in the early 2000s, Shahab left Tehran for Montreal to study. He continued his education in film studies and then began his practice as a filmmaker in 2014. In his works, he employs both fictional and documentary forms to express human conditions and to study how social and cultural behaviours relate to the environment and landscape.
