- Born
- Height5′ 10″ (1.78 m)
- Rafi Pitts' films have attained acclaim and awards around the globe. Pitts' first feature, Season Five (1997), premiered in the Venice Film Festival. His second, Sanam (2000) was hailed by French critics and compared to The 400 Blows (1959). In 2003, Pitts presented his controversial feature documentary, Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty (2003) in the Official Selection of the Locarno Film Festival . It's Winter (2006) premiered in the Berlin Competition, and one year later, the Seattle International Film Festival honored Pitts with the Emerging Masters Award for his work. In 2010, Pitts' fifth feature The Hunter (2010) was also nominated for the Berlin Golden Bear as well as Best Actor for his performance in the leading role. In 2012 Ben Affleck invited Pitts to join him as an actor as well as his personal consultant on the feature film Argo (2012), which went on to win the Oscar for Best Motion Picture the following year. In 2016 Pitts premiered Soy Nero (2016) in the Berlin Film Festival and for the third time running he was nominated for the Golden Bear.
Born 1967 in Iran, Pitts spent his childhood in Tehran, where he lived in a basement flat underneath a post-production studio. During the war between Iran and Iraq, in 1981, he fled the country and moved to Britain. In 1991 Pitts graduated from Harrow College - Polytechnic of Central London with a BA (Hons) Degree in Film and Photography. His first short, In Exile (1991), was presented the same year at the London International Film Festival. In the 90's, Pitts moved to Paris and worked on films by Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Jean-Luc Godard.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anthony Ray
- Member of the 'Best First Feature' jury at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival in 2009.
- Member of the 'Filmmakers of the Present' jury at the 59th Locarno International Film Festival in 2006.
- His father is British, his mother Iranian, his stepfather French.
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 69th Locarno International Film Festival in 2016.
- Soy Nero (2016) won the 'Grand Prix "Aleksandar Sasa Petrovic" for Best Film' at the 22nd Belgrade Auteur Film Festival in 2016.
- For any film, whether Iranian or not, a podium like the Berlin Film Festival, obviously, is beautiful. Because it helps art exist. If you work in art house cinema, how else are you going to get people to find out about it? How else are you going to give that podium for smaller distributors to be helped and they release it. So it's a question of telling the world the film exists.
- I'm more interested in the human condition than in governments and the politics they do.
- Dealing with censorship has become our art, how to say something, with certain rules.
- A political film is a film that is shown to an audience that disagrees.
- At its best, a film is completely unpredictable.
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