Born and raised in Rasht, Iran, Sharifi studied at Sooreh University in Tehran, graduating in 2003 with a BA in Filmmaking.

Found footage entered Farahnaz’s world with Moon’s Voice (2003), her graduation film. A portrait of Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri, one of the most celebrated singers of Iranian traditional music (1905–1959), the film revisited her life four decades after her death through available visual documents. It also became an opportunity to address the ban on women’s voices in Iran.

Iran According to Ads (2005) posed another challenge: how can one narrate decades of Iranian history through advertisements alone? From the first published newspaper, Vaqaye-e Ettefaqiyeh (1850), to the disappearance of commercial advertising after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the film is constructed entirely from historical images and documents.

Long hours spent searching through newspapers, magazines, photographs, and visual records from different periods of Iran’s history opened up a new horizon in her artistic practice.

But Sharifi did not limit herself to working with found materials. My Sad Face (2008) marked an important turning point in her filmmaking career. For the first time, she entered her own personal life to tell the story of a collective social suffering: depression. The film became one of the earliest personal narratives made by documentary filmmakers of her generation, who had rarely shared intimate aspects of their lives so openly in their work.

In Revolutionary Memories of Bahman Who Loved Leila (2012), a 15-minute film, Sharifi combined photographs from the 1979 Revolution with family images to create an informal and personal narrative of those days. Premiering at IDFA, the film marked the beginning of her international presence and introduced her work to audiences across numerous festivals.

In her episode for Profession: Documentarist (2014), a collective film, she incorporated home videos into the body of the narrative and once again returned to the prohibition of women’s voices in Iran. The project remains the first feature-length documentary in Iranian cinema made collectively by seven female filmmakers.

Missing (2017) explored the idea of being lost and became an opportunity for Sharifi to pursue the collection of amateur 8mm films more systematically. She searched for them in second-hand shops, among friends and families, gathering and digitizing fragments of everyday life that might otherwise disappear. In a country where no systematic structure exists for preserving such materials, and where no institution is responsible for collecting these micro-histories, individual efforts often become the only defense against oblivion.

Questions of memory and forgetting gradually became central to her work and eventually shaped My Stolen Planet (2024). Here, personal, political, and historical events meet once again. Built from home movies, collected footage, and Sharifi’s own recordings, the film brings together private experiences and a broader social history. Her first feature-length documentary, My Stolen Planet has become her most internationally recognized work to date.

 

Alongside filmmaking, Sharifi has built a remarkable career as a film editor and is widely recognized for her contribution to some of the most important contemporary documentaries. Editing, for her, is more than technical construction; it is another form of writing. Her sensitivity to rhythm, silence, interruption, and emotional detail has become one of the defining characteristics of her work.

 

In 2009, her first collection of short stories, Sleeping in the Open Air, was published in Iran by Ney Publications. The stories move between realism and subjective narration, questioning what we call reality.

Across all her artistic practices runs the same enduring gesture: rescuing fragile memories from disappearance and giving them another life through images, words, and time.

Since 2022, she has been living and working in Germany.