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BUSAN, South Korea, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Shayda, the debut feature by Tehran-born, Australia-based Noora Niasari, tells a deeply moving story based on the director's own childhood experience of fleeing domestic violence with her mother in a foreign country. The film, which screened in competition this week at the Busan International Film Festival, won the audience award at its Sundance premiere in January and has made the rounds of fests including Locarno and Melbourne.
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And while Shayda is a personal story set within the Iran diasporic community in Australia, it has resonated with viewers around the world to a degree that has surprised the director, Niasari told UPI in an interview in Busan.
"I didn't want to make a film that was just for an Australian audience," Niasari said. "The biggest reward for me has been sharing the film with [global] audiences because of how deeply people have connected with the film, in all different contexts."
Title character Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) is an Iranian woman living in Australia who has escaped to a women's shelter with her 6-year-old daughter Mona, played with remarkable emotional range by first-time actress Selina Zahednia.
Shayda is seeking a divorce from her abusive husband, Hossein (Osamah Sami), a medical student who intends to bring the family back to Iran after his graduation.
Niasari herself spent eight months in a shelter with her mother in 1995, and the film is "emotionally autobiographical" about the experience, the director said. She approached her mother with the idea of the project six years ago and asked her to record her experiences in a memoir.
The director's own memories of the time are "quite fractured," she said, a blend of confusion and fear tinged with flashes of happiness.
"It was a very stressful time, but it was also lovely to be embraced by the social workers and the other women and children," Niasari said. "It was the first time that we felt really safe and held by a community."
In a pitch-perfect performance by Ebrahimi, who was awarded Best Actress at Cannes in 2022 for Holy Spider, Shayda herself also manages to find joy and resilience in the midst of displacement -- whether going out clubbing with some of the younger moms at the shelter or giving herself a new haircut with a pair of kitchen scissors.
"It was really about that balance of light and dark, because I didn't want the film to be steeped in victimhood," Niasari said. "Even in the darkest times, you still have those moments of joy, and you need them to survive."
The film is set during the lead-up to Norwuz, Persian New Year, which Shayda is determined to celebrate with Mona despite the mounting dangers of being found by her estranged husband amid the diasporic community. (And despite the fact that the holiday of springtime renewal takes place as fall is arriving in Australia's Southern Hemisphere.)
"It's about Shayda reclaiming her cultural identity," Niasari said. "She's able to celebrate Persian New Year and pass on these beautiful traditions to her daughter. That's an act of defiance in itself -- she's taking the beauty and the light in a way that serves her."
While the film is illuminated with these sparks of hope, Shayda also moves with the beats of a suspense thriller. In every scene that Shayda lets her guard down, there is a mounting sense of dread that Hossein -- whom we do not meet for a long time -- will appear. The film also leaves space, for a while at least, to question whether Shayda is even making the right decision.
"For women after an escape, life is moving on but there is always this undercurrent of fear," Niasari said. "And society has a tendency to tell women that all it's in your head, or it's paranoia. I wanted to put the audience in that position as well."
One of the film's earliest champions was two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett, who executive produced Shayda with her company Dirty Films.
Niasari said that the partnership with Blanchett has helped raise the worldwide profile of the film, which opened in theaters in Australia earlier this month and is the country's official entry to the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars.
And everywhere it has traveled, from Sundance to South Korea, Shayda has made a connection with viewers, many of whom have approached the director to share their own experiences of domestic violence.
"I wanted to make something from a female point of view with all of the layers and sensitivities that go with that -- something that's more hopeful and gives women strength," Niasari said. "I didn't expect it to have such a profound impact with audiences."
