Anna Fahr
Biography
Anna Fahr is an award-winning filmmaker whose work focuses on the contemporary Middle East and diaspora. Her debut narrative feature, Valley of Exile, premiered at Cinequest in 2023 where it won the Jury Award for Best Feature Drama. It has since screened in 20 international festivals on 6 continents where it has won 9 awards. The film was released theatrically in select cinemas across Canada in the summer of 2024.
In 2020, Anna directed and produced two interactive web-documentaries that focus on experiences of exile and migration through a female lens. Migrant Mothers of Syria premiered among a select group of VR, AR and interactive projects at Doc Edge Festival in New Zealand and went on to win several awards internationally, including Best Digital Media at the Yorkton Film Festival and Best Documentary at Webfest Berlin. Her follow up web-doc, My Life in Limbo premiered at Montréal Digital Web Fest where it won the festival's Jury Prize.
Anna's narrative short, Transit Game (2014), examines the refugee crisis in Lebanon against the backdrop of the Syrian war. The film screened in 50+ international festivals, winning awards in Berlin, Florence and San Francisco.
In 2006, Anna independently produced/directed/edited the feature-length documentary, Khaneh Ma: These Places We Call Home, which examines questions of cultural identity and dual-nationality from the vantage point of three generations of Iranians living in Iran, Canada, and Germany. The film screened theatrically at
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the National Film Board of Canada cinema in Montreal and in festivals worldwide.
In the role of director
Valley of Exile – Canadian Film Fest 2024 (22/03/2024)
Two Syrian sisters try to start a new life in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in Valley of Exile. In 2013, at the start of the Syrian war, sisters Rima (Maria Hassan) and Nour (Hala Hosni) fled their home in Homs to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The sisters find themselves locked out of the apartment arranged […]