Film-maker Hassan Nazer on his love letter to Iranian cinema

The Scottish-Iranian director’s heartwarming new film, Winners, tells the tale of a child in Iran with a passion for movies. He talks about escaping to Europe and juggling four restaurant jobs to fund his early works

Hassan Nazer was in his first month at university in Iran when he realised that he would have to leave his homeland to fulfil his dream of becoming a film-maker. As a fledgling theatre director, he had been “red-flagged” – a possibly irredeemable offence – for putting women on stage in the holy city of Mashhad. His father, who ran a family confectionery business from a factory outside Tehran, had been opposed to his career choice from the start, but one of his uncles was on his side. “He said, after you get a red flag in this age, they’re not going to let you work. So basically, if you want to go into cinema or continue with theatre, this is not your place. You need to leave.”

Nazer had avoided military service, and had no passport or visa, so his uncle paid for him to be smuggled across the border into Turkey. “I didn’t have a destination at the time, I just wanted to go somewhere else,” he says. It took six gruelling months, often travelling on foot, to reach Europe, where his uncle put him in touch with a Kurdish family who had found asylum in Scotland and were willing to help, as they had been helped by his family back in Iran at an early stage of their own migration.

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