Batin Ghobadi was born in 1979 in Baneh, a city near the Iran-Iraq border in the province of Kurdistan, Iran. He was the last son in a family of seven siblings and a newborn baby when civil disputes caused his entire family to immigrate to Sanandaj, the center of Kurdistan Province in Iran. He was five when he started painting academically and had some solo exhibitions well into his teenage years. Because of his elder brother, filmmaker Bahman Ghobdi, he switched to cinema and made his first short film The Painter in 2000 when he was 18 for Sanandaj Media. By the age of 23 he had made several other short films including Surly Today (2002), Incommunicado (2003), and Broken Soldier (2004). Ghobadi moved to Paris in 2004 to improve his expertise in cinema.
Mill Valley Film Festival
