Tina Gharavi

Tina Gharavi ( born 1 July 1972) is an Iranian-born British film director, screenwriter, artist, and academic based in Paris and Newcastle.

Early life and education Gharavi was born in Tehran, Iran. She attended high school in Middletown, New Jersey. She initially trained as a painter in the United States before an on-set experience for a Hollywood production prompted her to pursue a career in the film industry. She later studied near Lille in northern France at Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains.

Career In 1998, Gharavi established the film company Bridge +Tunnel Productions, a multidisciplinary media production company. The company has produced projects across documentary, television, and narrative film.

Her directorial debut, Closer, is a 35mm experimental documentary which premiered at Sundance 2001 won the PlantOut Grand Prize at Outfest in LA. Her following documentary, Mother/Country, which chronicled her return to her mother’s house in Iran 23 years after the Islamic Revolution, was broadcast in the UK on Channel Four TV. In 2010, she was chosen as one of nine emerging directors to be mentored as part of the UK Film Council's Guiding Lights scheme.

In 2011, Gharavi directed two episodes of The Tunnel, the British adaptation of The Bridge for Sky, as well as two episodes of Ackley Bridge for Channel 4. Her debut feature film, I Am Nasrine, was released in 2013. It was nominated for a BAFTA for outstanding debut. Sir Ben Kingsley called it "an important and much-needed film". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film four stars, writing that it was "a valuable debut, shot with a fluent kind of poetry". which she directed, distributed by Netflix and produced by Jada Pinkettt Smith's Westbrook Studios. In 2024, Gharavi was announced as the director of The Shah, the Spy and the Madman, a documentary series on the 1953 coup d'état in Iran. In December of that year, Gharavi was announced as the showrunner for The Fox, an international crime thriller series based on the bestselling Icelandic detective novels by Sólveig Pálsdóttir.

In 2026 Gharavi's film adaptation of the 1919 Virginia Woolf novel Night and Day was released, starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, and Jack Whitehall. The Guardian gave it four-stars and praised the adaptation’s imaginative approach, describing it as a “dreamy, proto-feminist tale,” while Little White Lies called it a "muddled adaptation".

Gharavi is a Reader in Film & Digital Media at the University of Newcastle, where she completed her PhD, Narrative Cannibals: Whose Story Is It Anyway? The Politics of Representation and the Veracity of the Image in the Age of Digital Storytelling. She was invited to join the BAFTA Academy in 2017 and received a Fellowship from the MIT Documentary Lab in Boston, where she is working on her next feature project, The Good Iranian, in collaboration with Film4.

Selected filmography Film Year Title Role Notes 2001 Closer Director/Producer 2002 A Town Like Lackawanna Director/Producer/Camera 2004 Featherhead Director/Producer Short film 2006 Bread: Nearest Neighbor: Israel & Palestine Director/Producer Documentary installation 2007 Asylum Carwash Director/Producer Documentary installation 2007 Two Lighthouses Director/Producer 2007–2013 Last of the Dictionary Men Artist Documentary installation 2008 The King of South Shields Director/Producer 2013 I Am Nasrine Director/Producer/Screenwriter 2015 People Like Us Director/Producer/Screenwriter Documentary short 2020 Tribalism Is Killing Us Director/Producer 2023 A Beirut Love Story Director/Screenwriter 2026 Virginia Woolf's Night and Day Director TBA Forough: Let Us Believe in the Beginning of The Cold Season Director/Producer/Screenwriter TBA The Good Iranian Director/Producer/Screenwriter

Television Year Title Role Notes - 2002 Mother/Country [Channel Four TV, UK] Director/Producer 2017 The Tunnel: Vengeance [Sky TV] Second unit director 2018 Ackley Bridge [Channel Four TV, UK] Director Episodes 5, 62023African Queens: Queen Cleopatra [Netflix] Director Episodes 1-4 TBA Refurinn/The Fox Showrunner / Director