Coffee With Baba is a brutally honest examination of the divide between first and second generation Iranian immigrants in these polarized times. We want it to reach the widest audience possible, which is why we need your help with raising funds for its film festival run.

 

 

Amin (played by Omid Iranikhah) and his father Hossein (played by Shary Nassimi) don't talk much anymore.

Aside from the occasional phone call and brief gettogther here and there, they aren't as close as they would like to be. The COVID pandemic, now on its third year, has only added to that distance. One day, Hossein gets into a mild car accident and must take his car to the repair shop. He has a few hours to kill, so he calls his son and asks if he wants to grab breakfast. Amin agrees. 

Our 28-minute film follows their conversation in a coffee shop (think "My Dinner with Andre" with a Persian flavor). It begins with small talk and awkward silences. Then, the more the two men open up to each other, the more their differing worldviews drive a wedge between them. We get a glimpse of a generational divide that many immigrant families are all-too-familiar with but is rarely depicted in the mainstream.

Will Amin and Hossein ever come to terms?

To reduce COFFEE WITH BABA to a succinct description would be doing this deceptively simple film a major disservice. It’s the familiar tale of a lonely, aging father struggling to connect with an adult son who has naturally grown distant from him. It’s about the divide between first and second generation Iranian immigrants in the United States during one of the most politically polarized eras in American history. It’s about fractured identity and displacement. It’s me trying to make sense of these past three years of my life (2020-2022), during which a global pandemic has forced me to think about all these things daily.

In other words, COFFEE WITH BABA was the film I had to make when I made it.

Due to the hard work and dedication of a small handful of extremely talanted individuals, we were able to finish this ambitious film under a very small budget that I was fortunate enough to have been able to fully finance using my stipends from the Michael Collyer Memorial Fellowship in Screenwriting. We want our film to reach a wide, international audience, and that's what film festivals are for. Putting any film through the festival circuit, however, is expensive. I can no longer rely on the same means I used to finance the film's production.

With your help, we will be able to cover:

-Festival submissions

-Travel/lodging 

-Exhibition costs

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Thank you for your consideration. We can't wait to share this film with the world!