Tina Gharavi (Persian: تینا غروی; born 1 July 1972) is an Iranian-born British film director, screenwriter, artist and academic based in Paris and Newcastle upon Tyne.
Early life and education Gharavi was born in Tehran, Iran. She attended high school in Middletown, New Jersey. She initially trained as a painter in the United States before an on-set experience for a Hollywood production prompted her to pursue a career in the film industry. She later studied near Lille in northern France at Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains.
Career In 1998, Gharavi established the film company Bridge +Tunnel Productions, a film production company which has produced projects across documentary, television, and narrative fiction film.
Her directorial debut, Closer, is a 35mm experimental documentary which premiered at Sundance 2001 won the PlantOut Grand Prize at Outfest in LA. Her following documentary, Mother/Country, which chronicled her return to her mother’s house in Iran 23 years after the Islamic Revolution, was broadcast in the UK on Channel Four TV.
Her debut feature film, I Am Nasrine, was released in 2013. It was nominated for a BAFTA for outstanding debut. Sir Ben Kingsley called it "an important and much-needed film". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film four stars, writing that it was "a valuable debut, shot with a fluent kind of poetry".
In April 2023, Gharavi addressed criticism regarding the casting of mix-race actress Adele James as Cleopatra in the Netflix series Queen Cleopatra, which she directed, distributed by Netflix and produced by Jada Pinkettt Smith's Westbrook Studios. In December of that year, Gharavi was announced as the showrunner for The Fox, an international crime thriller series based on the bestselling Icelandic detective novels by Sólveig Pálsdóttir.
In 2026, Gharavi's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel Night and Day was released, starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders and Jack Whitehall. Peter Bradshaw gave the film four out of five stars in The Guardian, saying “It is such a sweet story and guilelessly eccentric – a butterfly fluttering just beyond the wheel of realism.” while Screen International described Bennett's performance as a strength of the adaptation.
Gharavi is a Reader in Film & Digital Media at the University of Newcastle, where she completed her PhD, Narrative Cannibals: Whose Story Is It Anyway? The Politics of Representation and the Veracity of the Image in the Age of Digital Storytelling. She was invited to join the BAFTA Academy in 2017 and received a Fellowship from the MIT Documentary Lab in Boston, where she is working on her next feature project, The Good Iranian, in collaboration with Film4.
Selected filmography Film Year Title Role Notes 2001 Closer Director/Producer 2002 A Town Like Lackawanna Director/Producer/Camera 2004 Featherhead Director/Producer Short film 2006 Bread: Nearest Neighbor: Israel & Palestine Director/Producer Documentary installation 2007 Asylum Carwash Director/Producer Documentary installation 2007 Two Lighthouses Director/Producer 2007–2013 Last of the Dictionary Men Artist Documentary installation 2008 The King of South Shields Director/Producer 2013 I Am Nasrine Director/Producer/Screenwriter 2015 People Like Us Director/Producer/Screenwriter Documentary short 2020 Tribalism Is Killing Us Director/Producer 2023 A Beirut Love Story Director/Screenwriter 2026 Virginia Woolf's Night and Day Director TBA Forough: Let Us Believe in the Beginning of The Cold Season Director/Producer/Screenwriter TBA The Good Iranian Director/Producer/Screenwriter
Television Year Title Role Notes - 2002 Mother/Country [Channel Four TV, UK] Director/Producer 2017 The Tunnel: Vengeance [Sky TV] Second unit director 2018 Ackley Bridge [Channel Four TV, UK] Director Episodes 5, 62023African Queens: Queen Cleopatra [Netflix] Director Episodes 1-4 TBA Refurinn/The Fox Showrunner / Director
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