Bahar Jahanara (Iran, 1993) is a filmmaker and screenwriter from Tehran, currently based in Amsterdam. Her work has been deeply influenced by the Iranian culture of nested storytelling and hidden narratives and the space between presence and absence. The forms and mediums of her work range from the intersection of documentary and fiction films to working with archival and found footage, physical photo manipulation, Experimental material-based image-making and poetry.

Her research at the Netherlands Film Academy is focused on how cinema can reimagine stories, objects, images, and gestures as coping mechanisms in the face of personal and/or collective grief, loss, and frustration arising from the erasure of identities, the impermanence of belonging, and disconnection from personal and cultural memory. It is also an attempt to make sense of the gaps left behind: traces of what was once there but is now absent. In parallel, her work explores the disappearance of female narratives, the ways in which they are obscured physically and within memory.

She is currently drawn to Persian carpets, archival footage, and music as voice as means to reimagine a life that might otherwise fade or be taken away. Her thesis is an attempt to explore these mechanisms both within herself and in the community she grew up in.