Zal Batmanglij (b. 1981)

Birthplace:
France

Born:
April 28, 1981

Zal Batmanglij is an American film director and screenwriter. He directed and co-wrote the 2011 film Sound of My Voice and the 2013 film The East, both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.  Batmanglij was born in France to Iranian parents. His mother is the cookbook author Najmieh Batmanglij, and his younger brother Rostam Batmanglij is a member of the band Vampire Weekend. Both brothers are gay. Batmanglij grew up in Washington, DC, in the United States. He studied anthropology and English at Georgetown University, graduating in 2002. There he met Mike Cahill in a philosophy class. They took a screenwriting course together and produced a short film that won the Georgetown Film Festival. Brit Marling saw the short film and asked if she could work with them.  Several years later, after Marling's graduation, the three friends moved to Los Angeles, California, where Batmanglij attended the American Film Institute Conservatory. For his thesis film, he made a 35mm short called The Recordist (2007), which starred Marling.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Director:
2007  The Recordist
2011  Sound of My Voice
2013  The East

Writer:
2007  The Recordist
2011  Sound of My Voice
2013  The East

Creator:
2016  The OA
2016  The OA
2023  A Murder at the End of the World

Director:
2015  Wayward Pines
2016  The OA
2016  The OA
2023  A Murder at the End of the World

Executive Producer:
2015  Wayward Pines
2016  The OA
2016  The OA
2023  A Murder at the End of the World

Writer:
2015  Wayward Pines
2016  The OA
2016  The OA
2023  A Murder at the End of the World

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.