Marva Nabili, an Iranian émigré fleeing the Islamic Revolution, settled in the United States.

Nabili was born in Tehran, Iran where she studied painting at the University of Decorative Arts. She became involved with the production of a film that marked the formation of "New Wave’ in Iranian cinema: she played the lead in Fereydoon Rahnema’s Siavash in Persepolis.

This experience drew Nabili to London and New York to study filmmaking where she received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in cinema. She wrote and directed a number of films, notably A Trance, Self-Portrait and Nanette in Vermont.

Nabili returned to Iran to write and direct an eight-hour television series based on classic Persian fairy tales. In the same yer she wrote and directed her first feature film, The Sealed Soil (1977), the story of an eighteen-year-old peasant woman caught in a transitional period between girlhood and womanhood and the struggle between cultural traditions and modernization confronting her village life.

The Sealed Soil, which deploys Brecht-inspired distancing effects to tell the story of the silent rebellion of a young woman, was self-produced and self-financed; she worked in television for several years to raise the necessary money to make it, where she shot documentary shorts and a series of children’s films. Although The Sealed Soil enjoyed success at several international festivals, the film was swiftly forgotten. Marva Nabili was only able to make one more film.

Her second, Nightsongs (1985), is (like its main female character) beautifully observant of social environment, human nature and the human soul. It is essential viewing for understanding an immigrant’s America.

Both of these films are very seldom screened; The Sealed Soil showed at the Berlinale Forum in 1977 and there is a 16mm print of the film with German subtitles in the Arsenal collection that can barely be screened any more. The film is in the process of being digitized in the US.