Overview

Parvana (The Butterfly) is a Persian-language short drama directed by Abbas Mohammad Ayyoubi, an Afghan filmmaker who escaped persecution in his home country and eventually made his way to Berlin. The film follows a young woman who flees Afghanistan only to encounter a parallel repression within the Afghan diaspora community in Germany and her struggle to break free from it.

Production

Shot in Berlin on the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera by DOP Gareth Stack, the film was made on a micro-budget with a cast and crew drawn largely from Berlin’s Afghan community. The production operated without a conventional shotlist or storyboard, relying instead on Ayyoubi’s instinct as a first-time director and the immediacy of the performances from leads Yalda Safai, Marzia Hashemi, and Soori Saeedi.

Post Production

The principal editorial challenge was linguistic. Afghanistan has upwards of 40 distinct spoken languages, and the film’s dialogue spans Persian and several additional Afghan dialects. Each required separate translation and verification before English subtitles could be generated.

I burned subtitled rushes to work from during the edit — without them, navigating the material would have been impossible. The edit was refined through close collaboration with Ayyoubi in Berlin, shaping the narrative across language barriers while preserving the emotional directness of the performances.

Festivals

Parvana premiered at a cast-and-crew screening hosted by Humanitarian Bazaar in Berlin in October 2022, followed by a festival run through 2023–2024.