Mohammad Haghighat

Mohammad (Mamad) Haghighat, is a director, journalist, and film critic. He began his journalistic career with the magazine Fīlm va Hunar in 1974, while also directing short films in Isfahan at the time. In 1977, he moved to France and met Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française, where he began to introduce Iranian films, including works by Sohrab Shahid Saless, Bahram Beyzai, and Amir Naderi. In 1979, he served as an assistant director to Sohrab Shahid Saless for The Long Vacation of Lotte H. Eisner. From 1983 to 2000, he founded the first annual Iranian Film Festival in Paris, which was the first Iranian film festival held outside of Iran after the 1979 Revolution. He collaborated with various French publications, including Cinéma Action, Positif, Cahiers du Cinéma, and Le Monde, as well as with Iranian cinematic outlets like Māh-nāmah-i fīlm, cinemacinema and banifilmonline. He completed his master’s thesis at the University of Paris 8 by directing a feature film titled L’état de crise (1984), which was accepted into the 1984 Locarno Festival and the 1985 Brussels Festival. He is the author of Histoire du cinéma iranien 1900-1999, the first book written in French about a century of Iranian cinema. In 2003, he produced Deux fereshté (Two Angels), starring Golshifteh Farahani, in Iran. The film was accepted into the Critics’ Week section at Cannes 2003 and invited to over 15 other festivals. His latest cinematic work is a 52-minute documentary film titled A cause de Langlois (Thank You, Mr. Langlois), produced in Paris.

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