Maryam Goormaghtigh is the director of the film Before Summer Ends. Hossein Rad is one of the three protagonists in the film. The film is about three Iranian men who live in France and go on holiday in the hope the experience will convince one of them not to return to Iran. Maryam and Hossein talk about how they improvised the film to tell a story that was closely related to their own.

John Smith is an artist filmmaker. After leaving the Royal College of Art in 1977 he became involved in the London Filmmaker’s Co-op, a centre for avant-guard experimentation in the UK. His film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) involved an apparently simple conceit (that a narrator was directing the events in the street) and showed that it had far reaching consequences for the way we understood cinema. It was also funny. In subsequent films like the Black Tower (1987), Slow Glass (1991) and the Hotel Diaries (2001-2007) he has continued to explore the way film and video reveal the world but are also bound up in conventions. He is a sophisticated and skilled artist, also not afraid of a bad pun.