Dr. Jamsheed Akrami is a former editor of the Iranian film magazines Film and Art and Film Quarterly. He has published extensively on iranian cinema, and produced a number of films and videos including the two feature-length documentaries on Cinema in Iran: Dreams Betrayed, about political filmmaking under the Shah, and Friendly Persuasion, which is a study of postrevolutionary cinema.

Dr. Akrami teaches film and television at William Paterson University, and is a visiting professor of film at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is the film critic for the Chicago Reader and author of several books, including Moving Places, Placing Movies, Movies as Politics, and, forthcoming this fall, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See and Dead Man. With Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, he is currently writing a book about Abbas Kiarostami.

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa is a full -time faculty at the department of Film & Video Columbia College, Chicago. From 1978-1983 she taught film at the school of Television and Cinema in Tehran. She received her MFA degree in Film from university of Illinois at Chicago in 1987. Mehrnaz has made number of short films which has been screened in different festivals including The Silent Majority, Ruins Within, and her award winning documentary A Tajik Woman. Mehrnaz has been the artistic consultant of the Iranian film festival at the Film Center in Chicago. She has written and lectured extensively on the Iranian cinema.