Esmael Barari

Esmael Barari graduated in filmmaking from Art University. In 1988, his short film, Reaction, won top prize at the first National Students Film Festival of Tehran and the silver plaque at the 1989 Ebensee Festival of Nations. His other short films are Nader's Gift (1989) and Loneliness And The Cold (1990) which was presented in FIPA Cannes-91 and received The Golden Butterfly for the Best Film at 5th International Festival of Film and Video for Children and Young Adults. Up to now he has made more than 20 feature, documentary and short films & TV series. His younger brother, Ahmad Barari, is a professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) in Canada.

Barari is part of a generation of filmmakers in the Modern Iranian Cinema, a Persian cinema movement that started in the 1980s and includes pioneering directors such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Amir Naderi, Abolfazl Jalili, Jafar Panahi, Bahman Ghobadi, Rakhshan Bani-E'temad and Majid Majidi. The filmmakers share many common techniques including the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues with documentary style narrative films. Barari's works are influenced by documentary filmmaker Morteza Avini and narrative film director Abbas Kiarostami, Who has a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of contemporary Iranian poetry in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films. "Barari is the unvarnished offspring of Kiarostami and Hitchcock!"^[2][3]