Fereshta Kazemi
- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Producer
Fereshta Kazemi is an Afghan-American film Actress in
the United States & Afghanistan. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan at the
height of the country's Russian take over, Kazemi fled with her family
on one of the last planes out of Kabul. They went to Bankok, Thailand
for a few years, then to New York City where she was raised. The family
migrated to the California Bay Area in her mid-teens. At eighteen,
Kazemi won an acting and academic scholarship to Marymount Manhattan
College in NYC, where she studied acting and writing, the first Afghan
female to study acting in the United States. Kazemi also earned a
degree in Philosophy & Cultural Anthropology from the University of
California, Davis. She continued graduate acting and screenwriting
studies at Academy of Art University and earned an MBA, emphasizing in
Film Production from Chapman University. In 2009, Kazemi starred in
Heal, a film about Afghanistan which has won twenty international and
domestic film festival awards, including winner of the Best Science
Fiction/Fantasy Category at Comic Con International Film Festival in
2011. In 2010, Kazemi starred in Targeting, a U.S. psychological
thriller, playing a young Afghan immigrant wife in the U.S., which
included a scene of one of the first on screen kisses in cinema for an
Afghan Actress. Kazemi has categorically been profiled as an artist
creating change in Afghan culture through cinema, with NBC News calling
her a "trailblazer". The L.A. Times said Fereshta offers "no apology,
no explanation...Raised in the U.S., she is back now for the first time
[in Afghanistan], determined to radically alter the way Afghans view
women - particularly women who act". In 2013, Fereshta played the
leading role in The Icy Sun, one of the first films openly dealing with
rape in Afghanistan. NBC News said her role "breaks new ground for
Afghanistan, where victims of rape can be forced to marry their
attackers to preserve their families' honor". Pulitzer Prize winning
photographer, Carolyn Cole, snapped Kazemi in one of the first
miniskirts to grace the streets of Kabul since the fall of the Taleban
in 2001.