Biography for
Rafi Pitts More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

1967, Mashhad, Iran

Height

5' 10" (1.78 m)

Mini Biography

Rafi Pitts' films have attained acclaim and awards around the globe. His first feature, The Fifth Season (1997), was the first Franco-Iranian co-production since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and premiered in Venice. Sanam (2000) was hailed by French critics as the Iranian 400 Blows. In 2003, Pitts presented his controversial feature documentary, "Cinéma, de notre temps: Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty" (2003) in Locarno . It's Winter (2006) premiered in Berlin in Competition, and one year later, the Seattle International Film Festival honored Pitts with the Emerging Masters Award for his work. Born 1967 in Iran, Pitts spent his childhood in Tehran, where he lived in a basement flat underneath a post-production studio. During the war between Iran and Iraq, in 1981, he fled the country and moved to Britain. He graduated in 1991 from Harrow College - Polytechnic of Central London with a BA (Hons) Degree in Film and Photography. His first short, 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.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Anthony Ray

Trivia

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival 2009 for first features.

Member of the jury at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2006.

Personal Quotes

For any film, whether Iranian or not, a podium like the Berlin Film Festival, obviously, is beautiful. Because it helps art exist. If you work in art house cinema, how else are you going to get people to find out about it? How else are you going to give that podium for smaller distributors to be helped and they release it. So it's a question of telling the world the film exists.

I'm more interested in the human condition than in governments and the politics they do.

Dealing with censorship has become our art, how to say something, with certain rules.

A political film is a film that is shown to an audience that disagrees.