Kamshad Kooshan

During his time at the Academy of Art University, Kooshan attended many seminars and conferences on Independent Film Making, including a trip to Sundance Film Festival at Park City Utah and attendance at Independent Feature Project in New York City. He started to write the screenplay for Surviving Paradise, which went on to be selected as part of the 50 selected screenplays from more than 2000 screenplays submitted to Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Kooshan went on to make, Surviving Paradise, his feature film debut in 2000 which starred the Oscar nominated Iranian star, Shohreh Aghdashloo. It took him 3 years to complete this project, but as an independent film, he worked on all aspects of this film, from gathering the financing to its shoot in Los Angeles and later on its distribution. He started the editing in San Francisco and with the help of a good friend, he secured a Co-Production deal with the Italian Sound Designer and producer, Fillipo Bussi, allowing him to go to Italy in order to do the Sound Design on the film.

In 1998, his screenplay, Surviving Paradise, attracted producers and investors and with more than 50 actors went into production in Los Angeles. Upon completion, after being invited to various international film festivals as an American film, garnering attention from critics and the media. The film went on a three-month theatrical run at major American theater chains, introducing Shohreh Aghdashloo to Hollywood and becoming the first English-language Iranian feature film by an Iranian-American filmmaker to be distributed theatrically in North America.

In 1991 he went back to Iran to visit his family and in that trip, he showed a few of his short stories to renowned Iranian Poets and Critics, such as Ahmad Shamlou and Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou. Sepanlou, identified several characteristics in Kooshan's short stories such as his visual way of writing and his strong similarities to watching a movie. He encouraged Kooshan to continue. Kooshan, upon return to the United States, decided that the logical next step would be to not only continue writing short stories and do photography, but allow these two fields to merge and lead him into film making.

In the next few years, he also started to concentrate on Literature, namely short stories and Novels. For a few years he read and read most of the canons of literature and most of the notable writers works. Having studied the ins and outs of writing short stories and Novels, he started to translate short stories from other languages into Persian. This included works by Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. He eventually started writing short stories and throughout the 1990s, he wrote many short stories.

He took three years off from university and went to work in the "Real World". Even though his first passion was always Music, he knew that he was too old to become an established Musician, or an Orchestra Conductor. For a while he thought of studying Philosophy and then Law, but eventually he decided that the fate of the future was in the field of Computers. In 1986 he went back to San Francisco State University and studied Computer Science and received his Bachelors with high grades. Now that he had definitely decided what his occupation would be and then later on in 1990 landing a high paying job at Sybase Inc, he decided to concentrate on his Artistic life. Having set aside his musical passion, he decided to concentrate on a new way of expression. He had done photography since he was 12 years old. He now decided to go back into the dark room and spend many hours and days in the dark room to do experimentation with visual composition.

One of his main loves was Music. Even though he was completely immersed in memorizing all the songs he could hear and learned to play music by ear from early on, his mother's adamant rejection of Music studies or any presence of instruments in the house, led him to abandon his passion for something less threatening to his studies at school. He picked up Photography while he was around 12 years old and continued on. As a 16-year-old, he became heavily involved in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, but his mother forcefully decided to cut his presence in Iran short and send him abroad to United States, where he traveled alone to go to High School.

Kamshad Kooshan (Persian: كامشاد كوشان; born December 19, 1962) is an Iranian-American Movie Writer and Director. كامشاد كوشان

While he was around 2 years old, however his father died and his mother "Noori Khanoom", Aka "Soghra Noorol Sadat- Sadate Larijani, despite all obstacles decided to raise her 5 children, namely the 5 boys she had, by herself. Noori Khanoom was from a wealthy family and because her clerical father was one of the Military Judges, she was not used to doing work and had always been surrounded by domestic help and chauffeurs, but soon she learned to rely on herself in order to raise her family. In the early 1960s traditional Iran was not an easy place in dealing with single mothers, but Noori Khanoom persevered and made sure that the boys all received a decent education. Kooshan spent his childhood going through austere environment where money was short and parental supervision was minimal and that is where he was able to receive most of his education, namely from the street and friends.