Reza Allamehzadeh

Who is Reza Allamehzadeh?

Reza Allamehzadeh is an Iranian-born Dutch film-maker, film critic and writer who lives in the Netherlands. He is mostly famous because of his films about refugees, such as The Guests of Hotel Astoria, and the documentary Holy Crime, which is about the murder of opposition figures in Europe by the Islamic regime in Iran.

Allamehzadeh was born in 1943 in Sari, Mazandaran province. He studied film directing at “Tehran Academy of Film and Television” in 1966-1969. Alongside with filmmaking he is regularly writing and publishing children’s books, novels and short stories. He is giving film and TV courses in various universities around the world such as Hollins University in Virginia, Leeds Metropolitan University and International R/TV Training Center in the Netherlands, where he has been living since 1983.

Allamehzadeh has been one of the advocates of Kurdish cinema. He is native in Persian and fluent in English and to some extent Dutch and Spanish.