Hengameh Panahi Dies: Legendary Celluloid Dreams Sales Agent Was 67

Groundbreaking French-Iranian sales agent and producer Hengameh Panahi, who represented a myriad of renowned Cannes and Venice prize-winning auteur directors, has died at the age of 67.

Paris-based press attaché Viviana Andriani, who handled press campaigns for a number of Panahi’s films, announced the news in a short communiqué.

She said Panahi had died on November 5 after bravely battling a long illness.

Panahi was a force to be reckoned with on the international film industry circuit, who launched dozens of renowned arthouse directors at the beginning of their careers and accompanied them as they won awards and fame.

Born in Iran, Panahi was sent to Belgium to complete her education as teenager.

She got her first big break in the film industry as head of international at Brussels-based animation studio Graphoui.

In an early sign of her flare for scouting promising talent, Panahi connected with John Lasseter and Tim Burton during a work trip to L.A. when they were cash-strapped young animators in the early 1980s and organized for them to attend the Anima animation festival in Brussels, run by Graphoui associate Philippe Moins.

Panahi was a pioneer in the sphere of film sales in the mid-1980s for the way she scouted and promoted international talent at time when most companies were focused on selling their own productions or local films from their home territories.

She launched Celluloid Dreams in Brussels in 1985, which she then moved to Paris in 1993.

Over the course of thirty years, the company sold more than 800 films, including works by Takeshi Kitano, Jacques Audiard, Jafar Panahi, François Ozon, Jia Zanghke, Bruno Dumont, Chantal Akerman, Marjane Satrapi, Todd Haynes, Laurent Cantet, Alexander Sokurov, the Dardenne brothers, Marco Bellocchio, Naomi Kawase, Fernando Trueba, Bertrand Bonello to list but a few.

Panahi was known for her ability to spot and build emerging talent. First films handled by Celluloid Dreams over the years include Bruno Dumont’s The Life Of Jesus, François Ozon’s See The Sea, Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone, Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre, Satrapi’s Persepolis and Xavier Legrand’s Custody.

She also had strong connections with Kitano, Jafar Panahi and Audiard, who retained Celluloid Dreams as their sales agent even when bigger companies with deeper pockets came along.

The company was hit hard by the global economic crisis of 2008-09, which prompted Panahi to look for more innovative ways of financing and distributing feature films.

In another example of her flare for backing promising young talent, Panahi partnered briefly with Efe Çakarel to launch indie cinema VoD platform The Auteurs. The pair went their separate ways, but the platform went on to become the global distributor and production company Mubi.

Panahi started scaling back her activities in 2014 but remained an important figure on the festival circuit.

In a first for any sales agent at the time, her slate took the top prizes at Berlin, Cannes and Venice in 2015, after Panahi’s Taxi won the Golden Bear, Audiard’s Dheepan, the Palme d’Or and Lorenzo Vigas’s From Afar, the Golden Lion.

Panahi continued to look after a handful of titles in recent years, with one of last titles being No Bear by Jafar Panahi (who is not a relation), which won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2022.