Award-winning Sundance films Bad Press and The Persian Version

We kick off our Sundance Film Festival 2023 interviews with the
documentary Bad Press and the dramatic comedy, The Persian Version.
Bad Press follows the battle for a free press on the Muscogee Creek
Nation reservation in Oklahoma. As a sovereign nation, the Muscogee
are not bound by the U.S. Constitution to guarantee freedom of the
press. When local journalists for the tribal paper Mvskoke Media
discover that the tribe's “Free Press Act” will be repealed, they
begin demanding that freedom of the press be written into the
tribe's constitution, led by Mvskoke Media reporter Angel Ellis.
The Free Press Act does get repealed, and immediately the newspaper
is in danger and put under the control of the tribal government.
The tribal council began censoring the news and preventing the
community access to free and fair reporting, which reporter Angel
Ellis knew would impact the upcoming tribal elections. Filmmaker
Rebecca Landsberry-Baker is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation
and a journalist, so the people in the film are her people.
Co-director and editor Joe Peeler was an acquaintance with a
background in documentary filmmaking, so he came on board right
away. Cinematographer Tyler Graim was brought on to the project
when Joe had had enough of shooting everything himself, allowing
him to focus more on what was happening as a director. They wanted
the footage in the documentary to give people an accurate feeling
of what it's like to be on the reservation, and the oppressive heat
of an Oklahoma summer. Becca, Joe and Tyler agreed that they also
wanted Bad Press to have a distinctive look, and were influenced by
newspaper movies such as All the President's Men. They made a
conscious choice for viewers to make the larger connections of what
is happening to free press from within the microcosm of the Native
American community, to the macrocosm of what's happening to media
in the outside world. A free press supports tribal sovereignty,
because it supports an engaged and informed electorate and the
movement to ensure a free press by writing it into tribal
constitutions is spreading in Indian Country. Bad Press won the
U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression at
the Sundance Film Festival and is seeking distribution. Find Bad
Press on social media: #BadPressFilm The Persian Version is a
dramatic comedy that follows Leila, a young Iranian American woman
who grew up in New York and New Jersey with 8 older brothers. Leila
is determined to forge her own path and has a tumultuous
relationship with her immigrant mother. When her father is
hospitalized for a heart transplant, she must return home to help
care for her grandmother and uncovers a secret about her mother's
past. Director and writer Maryam Keshavarz chose to make The
Persian Version semi-autobiographical. While much of the story is
true, the film had to take artistic liberties for it to fit within
two hours and also stay funny. Maryam wanted the past and present
within the film to feel similar, but for all of the storytellers in
the movie to have a point of view, so there is a tonal shift within
the film when Leila's mother's narrative begins. Maryam felt like
her cast was family, and as they rehearsed, she rewrote the script
as needed. Maryam's first feature film, Circumstance, also won the
Sundance audience award, and she went on to make a bigger-budget
feature, Viper Club in 2018, starring Susan Sarandon. But Maryam
found that she wanted to feel more personally connected to the cast
and crew during the filmmaking process, so she returned to
independently writing and directing with The Persian Version. She
feels that films from her standpoint in the world as an
Iranian-American hold a large place in her heart. Maryam enjoyed
making a film that was both meaningful, funny and reflective of
current and past societal and political views. The Persian Version
won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award & The Waldo Salt
Screenwriting Award in...