A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
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.
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
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:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
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.