Noora Niasari’s earliest memories are from the time she spent living in an Australian women’s shelter with her Iranian mother, who fled an abusive relationship and the wider oppressions of the Islamic Republic to secure a better life for herself and her daughter.
Five years old at the time, Niasari still remembers the experience of living in the shelter for eight months, where other women embraced her and her mother; their shared trauma, courage and resilience served as a binding agent. Niasari’s debut feature as a writer/director, Shayda adapts this personal experience into a sensitive, strongly performed drama she describes to Paste as “emotionally autobiographical.”
Starring Iranian-French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi (who 16 years ago fled Iran herself to avoid blacklisting and imprisonment by its conservative regime) in the title role, Shayda centers on an Iranian immigrant who leaves her abusive husband Hossein (Osamah Sami) and escapes to Melbourne alongside her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia). On their own in a foreign land, the pair find refuge in a women’s shelter, run by supportive Joyce (Leah Purcell), where Shayda fights a custody battle to protect their hard-won freedom.
Australia’s official submission to the Oscars, Shayda strikes a narrative and visual balance between conveying the oppressive tension and internalized paranoia many domestic abuse survivors experience and capturing the moments of catharsis and hope that accompany their journey toward liberation. Set around Nowruz, or Persian New Year, Shayda also reflects ideas of renewal and rebirth that showcase joyous, nourishing aspects of Iranian culture and tradition.
After filming Shayda in 2022, the Tehran-born Niasari watched on as the women of Iran led widespread protests, inflamed by the death of 22-year-old Jina “Mahsa” Amini in police custody. Their struggle, united by the slogan “women, life, freedom,” continues today, as women and girls risk torture and execution for defying compulsory hijab laws and resisting the country’s Islamist regime.
“I’m really humbled by the fact that this film can illuminate and shine a light on the injustices women in Iran face and continue to face,” Niasari tells Paste. “This revolution is not over.”
Shayda, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, is playing in New York and Los Angeles; it opens in Chicago on March 8 as part of a wider platform rollout, via Sony Pictures Classics.
Paste: You traveled to Park City, Utah, for the world premiere of Shayda at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival; the film won the Audience Award in the World Cinema Dramatic competition. What was it like to share this story in that setting?
Noora Niasari: We had a huge contingent for our film at Sundance, with 20-plus people, including my family. Now, things have calmed down a little bit. It was amazing to have my mother present. She was involved in the Q&As, and we also had the real-life Joyce with us. She’s become much like my godmother after all these years, and she’s still really close with my mother. It has been a full circle journey, having them be a part of this incredible launch. I think it was very cathartic and meaningful for them.
Shayda was inspired by your childhood, particularly by your experiences living in a women’s shelter with your mother. How did you begin the process of revisiting your past to adapt those experiences into a feature film?
I lived in the women’s shelter when I was five years old, in Brisbane, with my mother. The film has really lived inside me since then. Becoming an adult, becoming a filmmaker, there was something about the world of the women’s shelter, and the strength and courage of my mother, that was always inspiring to me.
Five years ago, I asked her to write a memoir, to fill in the gaps of my childhood memories; she spent around six months writing it. Every night, she’d read it to me. And I took that, and translated it. The memoir was around 50,000 words, and it tracked 10 years of her life, from her arranged marriage in Iran as a 16-year-old through to her achieving independence and freedom in Australia. There were around 10 feature films in that memoir, but I wanted Shayda to be centered and focused in the women’s shelter. For me, it’s really a love letter to mothers and daughters. I wanted the film to explore female empowerment and what it takes to shed your past and find independence in a world that is somehow against you wanting those freedoms.
And so the film very much originated from an autobiographical place. But over the three years that I spent writing the script, I also worked with Lynne Vincent McCarthy, a script editor for [The Babadook filmmaker] Jennifer Kent. She’s incredible and helped me to find the cinematic potential of the film beyond our experience. It’s very much still grounded in the emotional truth of our story, but there are definitely points of departure we found that make it a piece of cinema.
Were there formative memories of yours that coincided and intermingled with what your mother shared with you in her memoir? To some degree, would you describe Shayda as a mutual memory?
Oh, absolutely. My first experience of freedom was living in that shelter. When we were living with my father, it was a very tense, dark life that we had. There was no sense of freedom. We were very much living in a sense of fear and anxiety at all times. I think my experiences in the women’s shelter have always stayed with me because there was this camaraderie between the women and the other kids.
We lived there for eight months, longer than anyone else around us. Usually, women and children come and go for a couple of nights or a couple of weeks, but we were there for so long, because my mom didn’t have residency status. She could barely speak English. She didn’t have support from family or friends in the community. She was very much alone—and very young as well. She was in her early 20s. That memory never left me.
I was also very interested in exploring a story that centers on what life is after the escape. With domestic violence, and films that center on this subject, we often see the violence and up until the point where one escapes, but we don’t really focus on what happens afterward, how that trauma can follow you. It’s something that lingers. It’s obviously not something that just disappears after you leave. I mean, not obviously—a lot of people don’t know that the risk of partner violence increases once the woman leaves. I wanted to shine a light on this experience. It’s a very subjective experience, of a woman trying to shed her fear and to find a path to independence.
There’s such a balance between darkness and light in this film, between the fear and despair that Shayda feels in response to her situation, and the joy and warmth she at times genuinely feels and at other times projects for Mona. Tell me about finding that balance.
Well, thank you so much. I always knew that there would be a lot of darkness in the film, given they are in the women’s shelter. She’s just left her abusive husband. For me, Nowruz was one of the ways to counter the darkness with the light, with the joy and celebration of culture. Growing up in Australia, my mother was always the one teaching me the traditions of Persian New Year, reading Farsi to me, reading poetry, translating lyrics of songs, teaching me how to dance—all of those things that she did were the joy and light in our lives, especially when we were just starting to rebuild our lives.
That experience was very much instilled in the screenplay. I really did want there to be a balance of light and darkness; that’s what keeps the women buoyant. Otherwise, there’s this very strong potential to sink and to go back, to fall apart. A lot of women do go back to their partners, out of fear. But this joy and light offered by Persian New Year, by the dancing, by the sharing of her culture, it’s both a way to reconnect with her identity that is somehow being stifled by her husband, by family, by people in the community, and it’s her way of reclaiming that part of herself. Sharing that with her daughter is even more powerful, because that’s about passing it on to the next generation and filling up the soul with light and energy, despite all of the darkness that surrounds them.
Shortly after you finished filming in 2022, Persian women united in protest of the Iranian regime’s treatment of women; these mass protests have been described as one of the first feminist counterrevolutions. Did world events inform post-production?
At the beginning of post-production, and after the shoot, I had a depressive episode. I was struggling to wake up in the morning. I lacked motivation. I had to take two weeks off between the shoot and the edit, because the shoot itself was so emotionally and psychologically challenging for me. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve done and will do in my life, to relive my childhood trauma in front of a cast and crew who I had to show up for, interact with, and be a director for.
As you’re saying, the women-led revolution in Iran didn’t start until we were in post-production, and it re-energized my spirit in finishing this film. Our editor Elika Rezaee and I were very much unified by that. We shifted from this place of hopelessness and powerlessness with what was happening in Iran to finding agency in finishing the film as best as we could. We worked night and day to make the Sundance deadline; and once we did, it was a mad rush to finish the film. I finished it a week before the opening night premiere.
At this stage, I feel like I’ve climbed Everest a few times. I’m really proud of myself and everyone who made this film possible. I’m really humbled by the fact that this film can illuminate and shine a light on the injustices women in Iran face and continue to face. This revolution is not over.
Zar Amir Ebrahami is extraordinary in the lead role. Between this role and Holy Spider, for which she won Best Actress at Cannes, she’s delivered two of the most deeply felt portrayals I’ve seen in recent years of women battling patriarchy, who feel constantly that their bodies and minds are under threat. That she was also playing a character based on your mother must have been a singular experience.
She is extraordinary. I was introduced to her by the French-Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani—I’d shared the script with her and had a really lovely Zoom with her before we were financed, about six months before we started pre-production, and she suggested Zar. She said, “Zar’s special. She has this fragility and vulnerability.” I hadn’t seen Zar’s work before; it was before Holy Spider, before she won Best Actress at Cannes, and I looked her up. I obviously knew about her story, about the injustices that she faced. Similar to my mom, she had to start a life from zero in France. She has this incredible strength and resilience, but at the same time this vulnerability and softness. That duality is so rare in a performer—and, also, her openness to a character and to collaboration was so rare.
We just had such an incredible time working together. Before she left Sundance, we watched the film one last time, at the Sundance Mountain Resort, and we were holding hands half the time. There is this sisterhood between myself, Zar and my mother that was present throughout the shoot. My mother gave Zar a lot of material: court documents she’d gathered, tapes, memories. She was really curious about finding the parallels between her traumas and our traumas. That sisterhood was very deeply felt on set.
Every time she would do a take, there was something magical about it. You could just feel her reliving something; there was something going behind her eyes and beyond her soul. I was moved by her performance, and it propelled me to keep going throughout the shoot. She kept lifting me up. She kept telling me everything was okay. She was very encouraging and just a beautiful collaborator. I really loved working with her. For both of us, it was very cathartic.
Her chemistry and connection with Selina Zahednia, who plays Mona, was also magical. We had a two-week rehearsal period but an even longer rehearsal period for Selina on her own, to prepare them for this, because I knew the film hinged on that mother-daughter connection, on the bond that they have. That was a pivotal aspect, and being able to see that come to life in front of the camera was an incredible, unforgettable experience.
You studied architecture as well as cinema, so I’m curious to ask about your approach to filming some of the more harrowing sequences in public spaces, where characters are in a state of transit, as well as more private settings, such as the shelter and the library, where characters find more peace and stability.
Having that background in architecture allows me to think very spatially about locations and about mise en scène. The way that I visualize a scene is very much present in its writing. When it comes to location scouting and blocking a scene, it’s also very crucial for me to think about how the characters are moving through a space in relation to one another, and also about the quality of the color palettes and textures, and about the nature of the light.
Given the themes of light and dark within the film, I really wanted the shelter to have this warmth and welcoming feeling. I worked closely with the production designer Josephine Wagstaff to build a color palette, to build the textures and vibrancy of that space. Then, in contrast, when Shayda is in transient spaces, like the transport hub, it’s subterranean. She is coming from outside, from a place of light, down to this dark tunnel, to meet [the husband she left] Hossein, and have those constant goodbyes with her daughter. I love creating those experiences for audiences to spatially highlight the thematics of the story. And I feel like space, and how people relate to space, is such a huge part of that. That’s quite subconscious, I think, for audiences.
The other thing I wanted to mention was about the library, because you made a really good point about that. For me, the university is such an aspirational space for Shayda, a place of hope and potential and possibility. She also has a special relationship to autumn, with all the beautiful transitions occurring there. That was something very specific and considered in the choosing of that location.
You convey such a connection between different kinds of spaces and the emotional states they reflect for the characters.
There’s something alienating about those public spaces, very cold and isolating, which is a stark contrast to the shelter and also spaces like the Persian grocer, the fire-jumping festival—anything related to celebration of culture, which is vibrant and full of life.
The sequence where Hossein stalks Shayda at the transport hub validates the fear she feels in these public spaces; he’s not afraid to be outwardly threatening and controlling toward her, especially in that space.
Whether he grabs her or not, even just his presence, and them being in a public space, there’s a sense of threat. Who knows who’s surrounding them? Who knows who he’s bringing into the fore? There’s always some kind of tension in those spaces. That’s why I feel like, once we come back to the safe space, there is a relief, a sense that they’re going to be okay. But, obviously, those two types of spaces start to blur as we get to the latter part of the film.
Out of that, too, your work with DP Sherwin Akbarzadeh is central to establishing the tension of Shayda’s subjectivity, and other sequences like the festival scene are so beautifully shot as well.
Sherwin and I had done three shorts together. I met him during my time at film school; since then, we’ve been collaborators. He’s Iranian-Australian; we’ve always had this shared experience in our identities and in wanting to tell stories of our community. But in terms of our approach to Shayda, it was always a very subjective, intimate experience. We had made one short called Tam, just before Shayda, and that was very much an immersive female experience. We established a language, which was that “we’re always either with the protagonist or seeing the world through their eyes.”
And that was something that we just continued throughout Shayda. And in the instances where we’re with Mona, it was the same logic. There are a few exceptions in the film, where we may see things before they do, but there were very deliberate choices in those moments to build tension or heighten drama. Sherwin was great to work with. He was so committed—and he was shooting handheld for six weeks, which was extremely physical for him.
We were able to create a safe space for the actors to do their best work. We had a shorthand on set. Because we do so much preparation before a shoot, we didn’t have a huge amount to discuss, except for some differences in approach at times. I wanted it to be as unobtrusive as possible. Obviously, as a cinematographer, he wanted the lighting to be as perfect as possible. There’s always that creative tension. Together, we were able to create something special that resonates with a female subjective experience.
In places, there’s a heightened quality to the naturalism of Shayda, where the interplay between light and shadow feels almost painterly. Sherwin described it as “low-key chiaroscuro,” and I’m curious what your references were.
We built a huge library of references. We were very inspired by Andrea Arnold’s films, because of the nature of female subjectivity in her films. I was very enamored by the film El Sur, by Victor Erice. The lighting inside the house there, we really loved: the shafts of light that were puncturing the darkness of the spaces, especially. There were a lot of creative discussions, for over a year before pre-production. We’re incredible admirers, fans, and students of Iranian cinema. Having studied under Abbas Kiarostami, our desire for naturalism and a feeling of groundedness in the way that we were capturing the imagery, as well as capturing the poetry of everyday life and the small details… All of those things added up to the cinematography of the film.
It’s a cumulative psychological effect. As Shayda grows more comfortable with the world around her, she lets the light in, and the film brightens as a result.
Yes, that’s absolutely true. That was very intentional. Because we’re so much with her, so much in her psyche. As she’s able to come into her own and find her inner strength, she’s also able to let the world in and let the light in. I’m so glad that came across.
The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Isaac Feldberg is an entertainment journalist currently based in Chicago, who’s been writing professionally for nine years and hopes to stay at it for a few more. You can find him on Twitter at @isaacfeldberg.