Rafi Pitts Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Rafi Pitts
Writing
Biography
Rafi Pitts (born 1967) is an Iranian film director. Pitts was born in Mashad, Iran. Rafi spent his childhood in Tehran, where he lived in a basement flat underneath a post-production studio. He came to England (his father is English) in 1981 during the Iran Iraq war. He graduated in 1991 from the Polytechnic of Central London with a BA (Hons) degree in Film and Photography. His first short film, In Exile (1991) was presented the same year at the London International Film Festival. In the 90's Pitts moved to Paris and worked on films by Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Jean-Luc Godard. Educated in France and England, Rafi Pitts belongs to the new wave of Iranian cinema, which received numerous prestigious prizes in the international festival circuit. In 1996 he had the opportunity to film in Iran and he was the first film director (in exile) to do so since the Revolution in 1979. His first feature Season Five (1997) was the first Franco-Iranian coproduction since the Revolution. In 2006, he was nominated for Golden Bear award of Berlin Film Festival for his film, It's Winter. His 2010 film The Hunter was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival. His 2016 Film Soy Nero won the best film award at the 12th Bucharest International Film festival, in April 2016.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Chevrotine
Pierre is still mourning his dead wife when he meets Laura, a joyful and sensual woman with whom he will have a new child, little Autumn. But will this passionate and unexpected love be able to resist the demons of the past?
The Hunter
In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive.
The Book of Wonders
This is the crazy bet of a mother ready to do anything to help her 12-year-old son, Louis, wake up from his coma. After Louis' accident, Thelma decides to do for him the "10 things to do before the end of the world" that he had written in his diary. By listening to these adventures, Louis will see how beautiful life is and that he must come back! By fulfilling a teenager's dreams at the age of forty, Thelma will experience an incredible journey that will take her farther than she ever imagined.
Summer Frost
It’s summer and France is hit by a polar cold. Ten lone and lost souls find each other, a profound meeting as a last chance to hope and fear, to love and dream. Ten tales as tribute to Monet’s Water Lilies, ten tales portraying an impressionist painting of today’s France.
Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty
Intimate portrait of Abel Ferrara: the result is an eccentric road movie, with the restless film maker as a charming, shabby guide around New York by night.
Eureka
A cowboy arrives in a town in search of his daughter, a native policewoman arrests various offenders in a snowy landscape, while her niece, a basketball coach, reunites with her grandfather for a decisive journey that will shape her future, and a bird flies through time and space and begins to enter the minds and dreams of a native tribe in the Amazon jungle.
Argo
As the Iranian revolution reaches a boiling point, a CIA 'exfiltration' specialist concocts a risky plan to free six Americans who have found shelter at the home of the Canadian ambassador.
Production
It's Winter
Unemotional, restrained cinematographic poem, situated in a wintry and poor suburb of Tehran. A man is dismissed and his lack of prospects for the future make him decide to seek his happiness abroad. He leaves his wife and child behind and for a long time nothing is heard of him. Then a stranger turns up, a car mechanic looking for a job. The attractive single mother can’t resist his attentions. Very subtly, a struggle ensues that reflects that of a whole generation of young doubting Iranians who may want to leave the country, but hardly know how to start.
It's Winter
Unemotional, restrained cinematographic poem, situated in a wintry and poor suburb of Tehran. A man is dismissed and his lack of prospects for the future make him decide to seek his happiness abroad. He leaves his wife and child behind and for a long time nothing is heard of him. Then a stranger turns up, a car mechanic looking for a job. The attractive single mother can’t resist his attentions. Very subtly, a struggle ensues that reflects that of a whole generation of young doubting Iranians who may want to leave the country, but hardly know how to start.
It's Winter
Unemotional, restrained cinematographic poem, situated in a wintry and poor suburb of Tehran. A man is dismissed and his lack of prospects for the future make him decide to seek his happiness abroad. He leaves his wife and child behind and for a long time nothing is heard of him. Then a stranger turns up, a car mechanic looking for a job. The attractive single mother can’t resist his attentions. Very subtly, a struggle ensues that reflects that of a whole generation of young doubting Iranians who may want to leave the country, but hardly know how to start.
The Hunter
In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive.
Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty
Intimate portrait of Abel Ferrara: the result is an eccentric road movie, with the restless film maker as a charming, shabby guide around New York by night.
Sanam
In a small valley, riders pursue and kill a man. A horse thief, so his assassins claim. But for his ten year old son Issa, the disappearance of his father causes an avalanche of problems. With the family name stigmatized, Issa is bullied by the other children in the village. While his mother fights to clear her husbands name, Issa is left to his own devices. But unexpectedly, his solitude gives birth to his freedom, his real passion, horses.
Sanam
In a small valley, riders pursue and kill a man. A horse thief, so his assassins claim. But for his ten year old son Issa, the disappearance of his father causes an avalanche of problems. With the family name stigmatized, Issa is bullied by the other children in the village. While his mother fights to clear her husbands name, Issa is left to his own devices. But unexpectedly, his solitude gives birth to his freedom, his real passion, horses.
The Hunter
In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive.
60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero
An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.
Soy Nero
The border fence between Mexico and the United States is part of their lives; Mexican youths use it as a volleyball net on the beach, holding their own kind of international matches with their opposite numbers on the other side. When Nero scales the metres-high metal bars we suspect that he has done this often before: because nothing is going to divert him from his dream of becoming a US citizen. He follows the traces of his older brother which lead him to Los Angeles and the mansions of the rich and famous where he gazes incredulously at this very different lifestyle with its pools and double garages that he soon hopes will be his. His only chance of quickly acquiring a green card, however, is by volunteering for military service. Before he knows it, Nero finds himself in the desert landscape of the war zones of the Middle East, fighting for his citizenship with a machine gun in his hand.
Gallery
