Ali Abbasi

Growing up in 1980s Iran during a period of heavy censorship, Ali Abbasi developed an omnivorous cultural appetite after life-changing encounters with the global cinema. Alongside foundational Iranian art-house masters such as Sohrab Shahid Saless, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, his artistic worldview was shaped by the work of Stanley Kubrick, Sergei Parajanov and Werner Herzog. Now based in Denmark, the writer-director of Shelley (2016), Border (2018), Holy Spider (2022) and the Oscar-nominated Donald Trump origin story The Apprentice (2024) brings a similarly broad multicultural perspective to his curation of personally significant films. He credits Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) for inspiring his “fundamentally humanist approach to characters,” and Mary Harron’s darkly satirical feminist take on American Psycho (2000) for steering him toward “elevated political cinema.” Abbasi also pays homage to his late friend David Lynch, branding the psycho-noir thriller Lost Highway (1997) “maybe the best American movie ever.”