Abdolreza Kahani born in 1973, is an expatriate Iranian director, currently working in France and Canada. He made his first short film “The Smile” in 1988, while his debut feature film Dance with the Moon dates from 2003. In 2009 his film Twenty by Kahani won the Special Jury Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 44th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Several of his works have been censored for political reasons by the Iranian government, notably Delighted in 2016. He emigrated to France in the mid-2010s and has since worked with French and Canadian production companies. In 2021 he shot his first film in English, Isthmus, released in 2021. In 2025 Mortician won the Sean Connery Prize at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.