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With OCTAVIA’S VISIONS, I explore how speculative fiction and archival memory can disrupt dominant narratives, especially around environmental collapse, racial injustice, and queer futures. My work seeks to reimagine coexistence through a web of care that binds human communities, sea creatures, and all beings as part of a shared ecology. I first read Butler’s Parables in 2019, and both books pierced me deeply: here was a world she had envisioned in the mid-1990s, one that begins in February 2024—our present. This uncanny foresight fuels my belief in storytelling as an act of rethinking. What we tell shapes our present and future. That is the power of storytelling. Maybe this is our most important pressing invitation now: to imagine hopeful counternarratives together.
Country: Germany
Zara Zandieh (they/she) is a Berlin-born director and writer of Iranian heritage. Their work centers queer and post-migrant characters—complex, resilient, and full of contradictions—portrayed with tenderness and depth. Zara’s narrative style blends queer-feminist storytelling with arthouse cinema, inspired by Iranian auteur traditions. Their short films and video-installations have screened in competition at international festivals (BFI FLARE, Berlinale Forum, Oberhausen, Edinburgh, Sheffield DocFest, Inside Out Toronto) and won awards, including the ZONTA Award for Octavia’s Visions. Currently, Zara is developing their queer short film Kutchooloo (WT), their debut feature In Your Hands (FFA Treatment and Reference Funding 2021/23) and co-developing the feature I Forget You! (WT) with Vic So Hee Alz, (Development Funding by Kuratorium junger deutscher Film 2024). In 2025, Zara directed three episodes of the children and youth’s TV series ECHT friends (ZDF), screened at Max Ophüls Preis 2026. For 15 years, they’ve led film workshops for young (queer) adults and are facilitating an Acting Lab with the Asian New Wave Network. Zara studied at filmArche Berlin and holds MAs from UDK Berlin and UEL London. In 2021, they were selected for the Berlinale Talents program.
OCTAVIA’S VISIONS is inspired by the Parables of the African-American futurist author Octavia E. Butler,...
