‘It’s a celebration of life, of freedom, of the strong women in our lives’: Noora Niasari on ‘Shayda’

When Tehran-born Noora Niasari was five years old, she lived with her mother in a woman’s shelter in Brisbane, a world away from their family in Iran. It is an experience that has always stayed with her; the women who came from all kinds of different backgrounds, but who were united by the same desire for freedom and independence.

As Niasari’s filmmaking career developed, and it came to deciding what to story to explore for her first feature, she couldn’t get the that time in her childhood out of her head.