Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami

Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami is a Sundance Award-winning Iranian documentary filmmaker who was born in Tehran. She has directed one full-length documentary, four short documentaries and one animated documentary.

Ghaemmaghami's most recent film, Sonita (2015), tells the story of Sonita Alizadeh, a teenage Afghan refugee in Iran who uses rap music as a way to escape the traditionally limiting roles of women in Afghanistan after her family tries to sell her into marriage.

when Sonita's mother decides to sell Sonita to a marriage, Rokhsareh cannot keep her objective role as a documentary filmmaker and pays $2,000 to Sonita's mother and helps Sonita to record a music video and escape her situation. Interference of filmmaker in protagonist circumstances made this documentary controversial.

The film won the World Documentary Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016, and it also won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the IDFA Amsterdam Film Festival. The film received the True Life Fund at the 2016 True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo. The fund sponsors the subject of one film each year, and it offers the viewers a chance to make a monetary donation to help the film's subject. The fund collected $42,500 for Sonita, which is the most the True Life Fund had ever raised.

Ghaemmaghami currently lives in the United States, but has traveled to show Sonita at film festivals across the world.