Ali Abbasi
Birthdate – March 7, 1981 (43 Years Old)
Birthplace – Tehran, Iran
Ali Abbasi is one of the most interesting examples in a generation of Iranian-born filmmakers who developed their skills in Europe in multiple languages (in Abbasi’s case, in Danish, Swedish, Farsi, and English in consecutive projects) and have emerged on the world stage with distinctive visions. Abbasi trained at the Danish National Film School in Copenhagen, where he made three short films, Officer Relaxing After Duty (2008), In the Darkness Is the Light (2010) and M for Markus (2011), and then launched his feature filmmaking career with the Danish horror movie, Shelley (2016), starring Björn Andrésen, Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Peter Christoffersen, premiering in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama competition.
Abbasi was director-writer of the Swedish contemporary fantasy, Border (2018), adapted with co-writers Isabella Eklof and John Ajvide Lindqvist from Lindqvist’s story of the same title from his 2005 short story collection, Let the Old Dreams Die, co-starring Eva Melander and Eero Milonoff, winning the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival and earning an Oscar nomination. Abbasi directed, co-wrote (with Afshin Kamran Bahrami), and co-produced his first feature set in his native Iran, Holy Spider (2022), a true-crime drama about a serial killer in Iran in 2000 and 2001 starring Zar Amir Ebrahimi (who won best actress at the film’s premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival) and was shortlisted as an Oscar nominee for the best international feature Oscar.
Ali Abbasi was director only of his first English-language production, The Apprentice (2024), written by American political journalist Gabriel Sherman about Donald Trump’s early business years under the sway of evil mentor Roy Cohn, co-starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong and Maria Bakalova, and–after premiering in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition—managed to secure U.S. distribution via Briarcliff Entertainment (after fending off Trump’s legal team trying to bar a U.S. release before the November 2024 Presidential election).
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Personal Details
Ali Abbasi was born and raised in Tehran, Iran by his parents. Abbasi attended Tehran Polytechnic, and then left school to emigrate to Sweden and studied architecture at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Abbasi then studied filmmaking at Denmark’s National Film School, graduating in 2011.
Filmography
Border
Director (2018)
The Apprentice
(2024)
Holy Spider
written by (2023)
Some Facts About Ali Abbasi
Surrealist: Ali Abbasi has commented, “I started as a writer, writing short stories, before I did anything with movies, and I was very inspired by surrealism and magical realism—especially the South American writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar. And the reason was that growing up in Iran, the reality is a bit jelly-like. It’s not solid. It can change, it’s opaque, it’s very tricky, and sometimes it’s so strange and weird that you just can’t believe it. So the idea that there is a fantastical element within your everyday life and it’s not a dragon flying by, is very easy for me to grasp. And that’s what we tried to do with Border.”
Awards
Nominee, Best International Film, Academy Awards (2022); Winner, Best Film—Un Certain Regard competition, Cannes Film Festival Awards (2018); Winner, Best Film, Cineuropa Awards (2022); Four-time Winner, Best Original Screenplay/Best Non-English Language Film/Best Film/Best Director, Danish Film Awards (2019, 2023); Seven-time Nominee, Best European Film/Best European Director/Best European Screenwriter, European Film Awards (2018-2019, 2022); Winner, Directors to Watch, Palm Springs Film Festival Awards (2019).
