BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Tina Gharavi donates personal collection to the BFI National Archive

We are delighted to announce that BAFTA-nominated filmmaker, academic and equality campaigner Tina Gharavi, whose films are the subject of this month’s BFI Southbank season, Beyond the Frame: Women Filmmakers and their Archives, has donated her personal papers to the BFI National Archive.  

BAFTA nominated for I Am Nasrine (2013), Gharavi’s work focuses on the migrant experience, representation and storytelling, both in her films and numerous community-based projects. Her latest film Night and Day, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, starring Haley Bennett, Elyas M’Barek, Jennifer Saunders, Lily Allen, Jack Whitehall and Timothy Spall is due for release later this year. Gharavi’s next film, Forough: Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, a biopic about the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (exec produced by Wes Anderson) and is due to go into production later this year, shooting in Italy and the UK. 

Embracing themes of identity, gender and politics, the BFI Southbank season – Beyond the Frame (19-30 January) curated by the BFI’s Wendy Russell and Grace Johnston – considers Gharavi’s work along with fellow filmmaker Gurinder Chadha’s films through their personal archives, providing insights into what it means to be a Global Majority woman filmmaker within the industry and exploring the legacy of both filmmakers through a series of discussion events and screenings, including an in conversation with Tina Gharavi on 23 January. 

Gharavi’s donation came to the BFI National Archive in 2024 and contains 16 bankers boxes in total of paper materials and artefacts. The collection reflects the breadth of Gharavi’s work as a filmmaker based primarily in the North East of England as well as her community focused project work, including production papers, notes, scripts, storyboards, funding applications, correspondence, photographs, research and press cuttings for People like Us (2016), I Am Nasrine (2012), Kings of South Shields (2008), Mother/Country (2003), Closer (2001), and TV series Queen Cleopatra (2023), among others. 

The collection also includes Gharavi’s notebooks, a unique personal record spanning 25 years of her creativity from the late 1990s onwards. These notebooks show Gharavi at work and are filled with drawings, paintings and collages as well as notes on her academic and film work. The collection also included material on unrealised projects and papers relating to funding bids many of which have been rejections, something Gharavi meticulously collected as what is not made can sometimes be as important as what has been funded. 

The collection also reflects Tina’s community project work. She founded media production company, Bridge + Tunnel, in 1998 in Newcastle upon Tyne, working to make mainstream projects with a strong community, education and activist element at their core. The archive also contains papers relating to the media training project, Kooch Cinema Group, set up and established by Gharavi in 2001, made up of asylum seekers and refugee participants from the Middle East based in the North of England.  

On the donation Tina Gharavi said, “It is funny to think that I have made so little and yet accumulated this body of work. Perhaps this is what often happens to women artists, writers, filmmakers. Opportunities to properly launch work are rare, but we continue to create, to produce. What we have in abundance are rejections. What matters to me is the ability to show the process of making the work. To say, ‘this is what it was like to be a filmmaker at this moment, from this background’. I believe that my archive entering the BFI National Archive can stand as a legacy: a record that helps clear a path for other diverse and non-traditional filmmakers. It should not be this hard. And these untold stories deserve to be heard.” 

Wendy Russell, Archivist at the BFI National Archive and BFI Southbank season co-curator said, “We are thrilled to have acquired Tina Gharavi’s fascinating personal archive and are hugely grateful to her for this generous donation. The papers offer an insight into Gharavi’s creative process, as shown in the numerous notebooks she lovingly kept, as well as her continuous perseverance in funding projects. At the heart of this collection we see Gharavi’s commitment to both the migrant experience and filmmaking, and how her work brings these together with a level of care that is rarely seen.” 

The Tina Gharavi collection will sit alongside Gurinder Chadha’s collection in the BFI National Archive. Both collections form part of two major projects on the archives of women filmmakers that are currently being researched and catalogued, the Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) which seeks to make the work of women in film and their archives more discoverable, and the BFI’s current Our Screen Heritage project (presented with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding) exploring how we capture filmmakers’ digital archives for current and future audiences.