‘I felt an urgent need for empathy’: the Iranian-American director uniting her two cultures in film

‘The thing about Cyndi Lauper I identified with was how she embraced being different’ … Keshavarz. Photograph: Taylor Jewell/Invision

When Maryam Keshavarz was a young girl growing up in New York City in the 1980s, she would spend her summer holidays travelling to Iran, from where her parents had migrated. As well as her luggage, she would fly with small plastic bags taped to her body containing objects she would smuggle into and out of Iran.

The most common thing Keshavarz was asked to bring from the US was cassette tapes featuring American pop. “I would stick them in my underwear,” she says over video call from Los Angeles, “because it was an Islamic country. They were never going to check girls’ bodies.”