Tehran-born director Tina Gharavi is based between the UK, where she teaches film and screenwriting at Newcastle University and Paris. She is the founder and creative director of Bridge + Tunnel Productions through which she produced and directed the coming-of-age drama I Am Nasrine, which was nominated for the Bafta award for outstanding debut UK film.
Gharavi’s third feature, Virginia Woolf: Night And Day, stars Haley Bennett, Lily Allen and Jack Whitehall, and opens in the UK/Ireland through Vue Lumiere on June 19.
She talks to Screen about how she curates her cultural feed.
I have two completely different recommendation engines. The first is my students at Newcastle University. They’re twenty-something-year-olds, chronically online, and have absolutely no respect for my canon. I’ll suggest All About Eve, and they’ll counter with Euphoria. They remind me that culture is a living thing. The second is a small group of filmmaker friends scattered across Paris, Newcastle and Los Angeles. They are ruthless. If something survives their group chat, it’s usually worth my time.
My secret weapon is the novelist and academic Preti Taneja, who has effectively become my literary taste consultant. Preti reads with extraordinary breadth and intelligence. She doesn’t simply tell me what to watch; she tells me why it matters. Plus she loves rom-coms.
My producer and collaborator, Meg Thomson, is always watching films and has a great knowledge of international cinema as she is in the remake business with Globalgate [Entertainment]. It is always great hearing about a unique Turkish family drama that is being remade in South Korea.
One of my students persuaded me to watch a Korean dating show, which I resisted for about three weeks and then binge-watched in two days. A filmmaker friend recently pushed me towards the TV adaptation of The Narrow Road To The Deep North, which I found extraordinary.
I am in far too many online chat groups. There is one filmmakers’ group where people are constantly recommending obscure documentaries from festivals nobody has heard of yet. Another is made up of female screenwriters from a lab I was involved with years ago. Remarkably, we’re still together, sharing work we’ve made, things we’re reading, and films we’re excited by. A special shout-out to the Green Eyeshadow Glitterati, named after one member who bought green glitter eyeshadow to celebrate a recent win.
Then there’s the family group, which mostly consists of my brother and sister sending increasingly obscure clips from The Sopranos. We spent part of our childhood in New Jersey, so those references have become a kind of family dialect. The content of that chat, however, is protected by a stricter confidentiality agreement than most film productions.
Online, I follow people rather than media outlets. A clever editor in Berlin, an Iranian poet in exile, a film programmer in New York, a student making experimental work in Newcastle - those people are far more interesting to me than official recommendation feeds. I listen to Iranian cultural voice Alex Sham, Kate Muir, on menopause and the midlife crisis, and much brilliance shared by Jeanie Finlay, an amazing documentary maker and wonderful human being. My lovely friend, actress and model, Erika Linder, shares a lot on art and my neighbour Josep Almudever Chanza so much on queer radical culture.
And, of course, I listen to [Guardian film critic] Peter Bradshaw on reviews and Anna Smith’s Girls on Film podcast.
I trust passionate artists more than professional tastemakers. Obsession remains the best curator. My viewing habits are essentially a battle between the dead and the living: Virginia Woolf on one side, TikTok Lego videos from Iran on the other. Most weeks, they both win.
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