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Rita Rahimi is an Iranian filmmaker, director, and multidisciplinary artist based in Armenia.

Her practice moves across filmmaking, animation, visual art, performance, comics, and digital media, with a continuing focus on character, transformation, identity, movement, and cinematic storytelling.

Rita is the creator of FANA, an evolving narrative universe connecting films, characters, comics, music, and visual art. Rooted in the concept of fanā, or the dissolution of the self, the project reinterprets an idea with deep roots in Persian artistic and mystical traditions through contemporary stories of war, displacement, rebellion, absurdity, and survival.

Since 2022, she has worked extensively with generative AI, developing filmmaking methods that integrate writing, character development, visual design, performance, image generation, animation, editing, sound, and post-production into a unified directing process.

Her AI-assisted narrative short FANA: Back in a Sec premiered at the 9th Yerevan International Short Film Festival in 2026. She is currently developing FANA: Dead Hour, a dialogue-free short film about war and displacement, followed by FANA: The Roach, a character-driven story centered on the first meeting between Ahu and Adil.

Alongside her filmmaking practice, Rita teaches AI filmmaking at Inverse School, sharing emerging production methods with a new generation of filmmakers and artists.

I am interested in stories that exist between worlds.

Between memory and imagination. Reality and myth. The personal and the collective. The human and the technological.

My work often begins with characters undergoing transformation: losing identities, environments, relationships, beliefs, or structures they once depended on.

As an Iranian filmmaker living between cultures, and as a queer artist, I am drawn to people navigating contradiction, displacement, uncertainty, and reinvention.

Technology is an important part of my practice, but it is never the destination. I treat AI as part of an expanding cinematic language. Story, character, performance, rhythm, and emotional experience remain at the center of the work.

Through FANA, I am building a long-term body of interconnected stories that move between tragedy, fantasy, absurdity, comedy, political reality, and speculative worlds.

FANA is an evolving cinematic universe created by Rita Rahimi.

Set within a distorted, semi-apocalyptic world shaped by war, authoritarianism, social collapse, and the supernatural, FANA follows characters attempting to survive, rebel, connect, and retain their humanity as the structures around them disintegrate.

The universe unfolds across films, comics, characters, music, exhibitions, and future serialized stories.

Its name comes from fanā, the dissolution of the self, a concept that has appeared for centuries across Persian poetry, mysticism, and art. Rita approaches that idea through contemporary narrative cinema and visual storytelling.

Narrative Short Film · 5-7 min · In Development

After a rocket destroys her apartment, Ahu flees through the ruins of her city and descends into a subterranean purgatory where the dead wait in silence.

A dialogue-free story of war, displacement, survival, and the moment distant violence becomes immediate and impossible to ignore.

Currently seeking producers, funding, and production partners.

Narrative Short · 10-15 min · In Development

Ahu and Adil meet for the first time in a war-torn city where surviving the rules can be as dangerous as breaking them.

The story brings together two central FANA characters with completely opposing relationships to authority: Ahu, an instinctive rebel, and Adil, an intensely law-abiding man whom the system has somehow failed to recognize.

Currently seeking development and producing partners.

• 20269th Yerevan International Short Film Festival
• 2018The Room · Pejman Foundation
• 2015Edinburgh Iranian Festival
• 201413th International Kansk Video Festival
• 2014Silicon Valley Science Fiction Short Film Festival
• 2014OAKUFF Oakland Underground Film Festival
• 20148th Toronto Urban Film Festival
• 2014Wasteland Film Festival
• 2014MACABRO XIII
• 201310th Beijing Independent Film Festival
• 20137th Toronto Urban Film Festival
• 201336th Gothenburg International Film Festival
• 201342nd Rotterdam International Film Festival
• 20117th Tehran International Animation Festival
• 20075th Tehran International Animation Festival

AI Filmmaking Instructor · Inverse School

Rita teaches emerging AI filmmaking methods with a focus on cinematic storytelling, character development, visual production, animation, editing, and integrated generative workflows.