Mina Rad

Born in 1962 in Teheran and educated in France and England, Mina Rad is a documentary filmmaker, producer, festival director and member of jury, critic of cinema and organizer of international conferences and seminars. She created the AprèsVaran network and International Documentary Film Festival AprèsVaran.

Mina Rad left Iran at 18 following the Islamic Revolution, studied history and journalism and began her professional life as an international political and cultural journalist reporting for the BBC, RFI and AFP in various Central Asian countries. While traveling the world for twelve years, she discovered her passion for world music and became Editor-in-Chief of World Music Supplements for the monthly magazine, Le Monde de la Musique. In the 1990s, she received an award for the best female reporter for her work on Central Asia.

She participated in an Ateliers Varan workshop 2012, where she directed her first film For Me the Sun Never Sets, that was awarded the prize for best documentary at the Cinema Verite Film Festival in Tehran in 2012. In 2017, French TV5 Monde broadcast her film Jean Rouch Persian look, on the occasion of the centenary of Jean Rouch , which is about the interest of Jean Rouch about the transe tradition in Iran.

Since 2012, she has been directing the « International documentary Film Festival Apresvaran, on the step of Jean Rouch » in Paris and has created a global documentary networking amongst the filmmakers who went through an Ateliers Varan workshop. She is also in charge of public relations of Jean Rouch Foundation and has created a global seminar on Pierre Perrault. She has directed the cultural festival in the Indian Ocean financed by the European Commission in Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion, Comores and Madagascar, and has also worked as an international consultant for Iranian national school of cinema in Iran.

As a documentary filmmaker, she has directed more than ten films. Her most recent films include Persian Tales, Jean Rouch in Iran that is published in DVD compilation in France at Montparnasse publisher and The future of the past, Pierre and Yolande Perrault, which are both dedicated to the two directors who greatly influenced her own approach to filmmaking. MR and Mrs Mafi, which is a story of one century of modernization of education in Iran through the life of Mr and Mrs Mafi, the founders of the Mehran School, which Mina Rad herself attended as a child, is a documentary based on rare archives. The films that she directs and produces through World Cultural Diversity production are related to archives and the transmission of knowledge of French, Iranian, Canadian, Brazilian anthropologist-filmmaker and the Amerinidiens in Amazon in Brazil. They are telecast widely and shown at festivals as well as anthropology conferences across the world. Mina Rad is a cinema critic and writes about various film festivals in different media and in apresvaran.org. She has been the president of the jury in the 17th edition of Bombay International film festival MIFF in 2022 and adviser on programming for different documentary film festivals.

Mina Rad’s films and all other initiatives are about the preservation and restitution of cultural heritage. It is to her a way of looking at the universe, following the path of cultural identity in the world.

• minarad.fr