Sam

I was born in Tehran and have lived in Munich since 2012. My path here wasn't a straight one, and not one I chose. I had to leave the country because I was politically persecuted. In Munich I started over from scratch, working my way up to two master's degrees in architecture and art. Today I work between city, space, art, and film. Maybe that's why I often think of films spatially and of spaces sometimes as films. In film, too, someone decides where we look and what stays outside the frame. Who is looking? Who has the right to tell someone else's story? No space is neutral, and no image is either. With Ciné Vélo Cité, the bicycle cinema I co-founded and whose board I sit on, we bring cinema back into the city. Since 2025 I've also been teaching, at the University of Siegen and at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where film is my method for thinking through architecture and space. Asylum isn't something I speak about from the outside. But that's exactly why I'm concerned with how quickly a person can be reduced to a single story, to refugee, to origin, to crisis, to politics. A person lived before that, and keeps living after, with music, memory, and a childhood that has nothing to do with flight at all.