TAMASHA

25 x 30' for BBC Persian

Tamasha is BBC Persian Television’s Arts and Culture series.

Persian TV launched in January 2009 as part of the BBC World Service. The channel is widely regarded as the most successful project from the BBC World Service since the end of the Cold War and has had huge influence in Iran.

Presented by Maryam Erfan, Tamasha is transmitted fortnightly, with two repeats. From June 2010 it will transmit weekly. Tamasha is a half hour magazine programme, similar to BBC’s Culture Show, typically including 3 or 4 items, which cover the visual arts, theatre, exhibitions, classical music etc .

Because Maryam speaks excellent English, we often make films which transmit in BBC Four's News Arts slots.

Series 2 is currently in production.

100 YEARS OF GIRL GUIDES

1 x 60' for BBC 4
Producer/ Director: Rosalind Bain

In 2009 the Girl Guides celebrated their centenary. With a membership of over 600,000, nearly half the female population of Britain has been involved with the Brownies and Girl Guides at some time during their lives.

Narrated by Dominic West (The Wire), 100 Years of the Girl Guides delves into the movement’s extraordinary archive and interviews a host of former Girl Guides from veterans to household names Kelly Holmes, Clare Short, Kate Silverton, Shappi Khorsandi and Tanni Grey-Thompson (Para-Olympian Gold Medallist).

The film includes exclusive use of the Girl Guides’ astonishing film archive. From 1928 they have kept a record of all their activities, from camps, to foreign exchange visits, from royalty to learning how to sail. The films show their work in the two world wars, to campaigns about body image and mental health, with over 50 films showing their work over the past century.

FIGHTING FOR AFGHANISTAN

1 x '50 for BBC Persian
Producer/ Director: Wanda Koscia

In the middle of the 20th century, Afghanistan was balanced between ancient tradition and the modern world. The vast majority of the population was deeply religious, largely rural and mainly illiterate. Kabul was an exception. In the 1960s, King Zahir Shah had allowed political parties to develop and two main ideologies emerged: The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan – the PDPA - was a Marxist communist party. Their main rival was the radical Islamic movement.

The documentary charts Afghanistan's history of wars up to the present day, the players who have shaped its recent history and those who will shape its future.

THE GENIUS OF OMAR KHAYYAM

1 x 60' for BBC 4, BBC Persian and BBC World
Producer/ Director: Jasbir Saund

Born almost 1000 years ago in Persia, Omar Khayyam was an astronomer, mathematician and poet. His contribution to algebra and geometry has sealed his reputation as one the greatest mathematicians of all time; and a lunar crater has been named after him for his advances in astronomy.
In the West, Khayyam is best known for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam most famously translated by a Victorian man of letters called Edward Fitzgerald. Published in 1859, the same year as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the film shows how and why the Rubaiyat became one of the most famous poems in the English language, attracting a who’s who of literary admirers including Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Filmed in part across Iran during the run up to the 2009 election, the Genius of Omar Khayyam is presented by Sadeq Saba and includes contributions from major cultural figures rarely interviewed by the Iranian national media. They include singer and superstar Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Aydin Ardeshlu, Iran’s most celebrated painter and art historian, and the internationally renowned philosopher, Dariush Shayegan.

Omar Khayyam remains a significant figure in present day Iran, and the film explores why despite his apparent religious scepticism, Khayyam’s philosophy continues to resonate with modern Iranians.

AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE

1 X 30’ for BBC Persian and BBC World
Producer/ Director: Rosalind Bain

30 years ago Iranian students took over the United States embassy in Tehran and held the Americans inside hostage. It took 444 days for the hostages to be released. This documentary charts the story of the hostages, the reaction of the media in America and how it led to a complete breakdown in relations between Iran and the United States.

For thirty years the building of the Iranian embassy in Washington has been abandoned. The hostage crisis led to the downfall of an American president Jimmy Carter, but it was also the start of Iranians political and economic isolation.

Through exclusive interviews with the former hostages – including the diplomats involved Bruce Laingen and now Ambassador John Limbert, and CIA agent Bill Daugherty – the film re-creates the drama of the event, and shows its impact on US-Iranian relations with comment from broadcaster Ted Koppel. Koppel’s long-running Nightline programme actually started life as a nightly report on the hostage crisis, and after the crisis ended – at the end of the 444 days – the programme had entrenched itself on the ABC programming schedule, and gave Koppel a career.

BRITAIN AND IRAN

1 x 60' for BBC 4
Producer/ Director: Neil Cameron

Documentary charting the history of the relations between Britain and Iran. Writer and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue, who used to live in Tehran, explores the fraught but often surprisingly intimate history of Britain’s relations with Iran, and asks why Iranians think that if something goes wrong in Iran, Britain must have something to do with it.
Meeting prominent Iranians, he examines the foundations and justification for these Iranian suspicions and asks - why are they still there after 30 years of isolation?