She Was There, Too
Pre-Show
Screenplay Awards
Oscar returns from a year-long silent retreat to find his brother Archie in a coma and his family in disarray. Archie, the quiet soul always overlooked, has married Bahar—a reserved, enigmatic Iranian woman the family instantly mistrusts. They call her “the witch,” accuse her of manipulation, and blame her for Archie’s accident.
As Oscar digs deeper, driven by guilt and old family ghosts, Bahar becomes both target and mystery. But she remains half-seen—her face obscured, her intentions unreadable, her past a fog of silence and fragments. The house, thick with secrets, begins to close in. Through archival footage, home videos, and a chorus of competing memories, Oscar is forced to reckon with a truth that resists simple resolution: Archie may have chosen Bahar not out of weakness, but love.
She Was There, Too is a chamber piece of suspicion and grief, a mystery built not on crime but on misunderstanding, told through fractured time, layered voices, and the fragile hope of redemption in the aftermath of betrayal—real or imagined.
Biography
Azita Damandan is an Iranian-Australian writer, director, and producer with over thirty years of experience in cinema across Iran and Australia. A multi-award-winning filmmaker, Azita began her creative journey writing short stories published in major Iranian newspapers before transitioning to film, where she quickly made a name for herself as a self-taught director. Her early short films—including Archives, Alley, Neighbour, and Woman, Man, Child—earned national acclaim, with Neighbour screening in Berlin and Woman, Man, Child winning Best Director at Iran’s First Women Filmmakers’ Festival.
Azita also worked as First Assistant Director alongside renowned auteurs such as two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi. After immigrating to Australia in 2006, she founded Red Geranium Productions and rebuilt her career from scratch, producing over eight award-winning short films including Lullaby, Silence, Untold, and Unseen. In 2023, she completed her first feature film Mourners—a poetic anthology exploring the quiet trauma of life under dictatorship—which has won multiple international awards and is distributed by Amazon Prime and Sony Pictures. She is currently developing two new feature films: A for Aleph, a semi-biographical and politically resonant story interweaving the literary legacy of Iranian writer Houshang Golshiri with the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement; and She Was There, Too, a haunting mystery-drama exploring fractured memory, love, and exile.
