Arsalan Baraheni is a Canadian writer, director and producer who has been working on fiction and documentary films for more than a decade now. His films have screened all over the world and his documentary projects are also very well known in the Iranian and Persian speaking communities around the world.
A Poet is Killed is the latest feature documentary of Baraheni which is an official selection of the International Human Rights Film Festival in Albania. The 17th edition of the festival will take place in Tirana and the film will screen in late Septemeber amongst the titles that deal with human rights issues from all over the globe. Mohammad Mokhtari was a well known Iranian poet who was killed in the chain murders of Iran. Strangled to death, his body was found in the street in Tehran with a pen in his pocket.
His feature film, "Actors of God'', is a film within a film genre which premiered at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and was screened further in New York, Milan, Gothenburg, Nice, Milan, and Montreal in various independent film festivals and art cinemas around the world. The films produced and directed by Baraheni have screened in over 20 film festivals, some of them have been Oscar qualifying festivals such as the Flickers Rhode Island Film Festival in U.S. Exilic Trilogy features three of his Persian language documentary films featuring three of the most important Iranian artists in exile which screened in over 20 cities in U.S. and Canada.
Arsalan is born into a very well known artistic family of a mixed background. His father is a famous Persian poet and writer who was forced into exile because of his activities in relation to human rights in Iran. His father was also the president of Pen Canada and a close friend of literary figures such as Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Allen Ginsberg, and Helene Cixous.
Arsalan is the founder of Baraheni Film Productions, a Canadian company based in Montreal, Toronto, and LA.
“A Poet is Killed” is a social, poetic and political manifestation about censorship, revolution, intellectual movement and the chain murders of the intellectuals in mid-1990s in Iran. The film features a legendary and rebellious Iranian poet who was killed after writing a statement demanding freedom of speech in Iran. The film also gathers some of the most important and legendary Iranian poets and writers to speak about censorship of the writers in Iran.
Trailer: