Maryam Ghorbankarimi
Maryam is currently living is Lancaster, UK where she is a lecturer in film practice at Lancaster University.
She is born into a filmmaking family (See History of Bina Film) with two older siblings Mahsa and Mohammad, who are also filmmakers. Raised in Tehran she moved to Canada with her family in 2001 where she continued her higher education in Film Studies at Ryerson University. At Ryerson she tried her hand at every aspect of filmmaking process from cinematography to editing, writing and directing. Upon graduation she had made a few short films such as Ties and Past of Futures to name a few.
She always dreamt of continuing her education to PhD level while travelling the world. She continued her studies at MA level in Photographic Preservation and Collection Management, a join degree between Ryerson University and Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. Her MA thesis entitled 19th Century Middle East through Photography examined two very different and yet similar travel photographic albums. One compiled by a French amateur photographer travelling to the Levant and Egypt and the other consisted of commercially produced photographs of the region illustrating a similar journey by an American traveller from upstate New York. Maryam has endeavoured to carry on making films while pursuing her studies. At this stage she knew editing and post-production was her passion and also it was the one process of production one could still collaborate remotely (See Heaven or Not (2007)).
Living in Rochester the second year of the MA gave her courage to try and pursue her PhD a bit further afield. Moved to the UK in 2007, Maryam began her PhD in Film Studies at Edinburgh University. After completing her PhD she began teaching at University of St Andrews, where she worked until August 2018. Her PhD thesis on representation of women in Iranian cinema was published in 2015 as a book entitled A Colourful Presence: The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema. She continued filmmaking and collaborating with local filmmakers and artists on various film projects (see Editing Projects). In 2012 she collaborated with her brother and edited his feature film The Desert Fish (2013).
She continues with both of her passions, research and filmmaking today. Her new edited volume on the works of Rakhshan Banietemad, one of the most prominent Iranian directors entitled ReFocus: The works of Rakhshan Banietemad forthcoming by Edinburgh University Press.
In June 2020, amidst of the lockdowns, she started her own UK based production company Bina Film. With permission from her family she is using the name of their company in Iran, the company in Iran was active from late 1980s to early 2000s.
