Marva Nabili

Marva Nabili (born 1941) During her youth in Iran, Nabili was close to the Iranian New Wave, playing the lead role in the Fereydoun Rahnema film Siavash dar Takht-e Jamshid (Siavash in Persepolis).

Career Nabili returned to Iran in 1975 to shoot a film she had written about local folklore, Afsanehha-ye Kohan, commissioned by Iranian national television. This film primarily served as a pretext for shooting The Sealed Soil (Khak-e Sar Behmohr), which she did without authorization and with a non-professional crew. The film traces the "passive revolt" of a young girl who refuses to marry, a transformation that can be seen as a metaphor for Iran's transition from tradition to modernity. She smuggled the original negative out of Iran and edited it at her university in New York. The Sealed Soil met with international critical acclaim, notably winning an award at the London Film Festival in 1977. The film is the second feature film made by a female director in Iran.

In 1984, Nabili shot her first film in the United States, Nightsongs, about the struggles of a Chinese family to integrate into New York and its Chinatown. The film was shot with a budget of $400,000, its production sparked controversy, with the Asian-American community and filmmakers criticizing it for depicting a community to which it did not belong.