Tracking Ayatollah

Tracking Ayatollah’s Spokesman in Canada

NOV 4

7:30 PM

Scotiabank Dance Centre

Mahmoud Azimaee, producer and host of Radio Dastneveshteha Podcast, will present a short talk on “Becoming a part-time documentary maker and Podcaster.”

Following the talk, a live podcast recording will be performed. This program aims to walk the audience through Ayatollah’s spokesman’s journey in Canada from being a student in the late 1960s, falling in love with a Canadian journalist and becoming Iran’s Foreign Minister during Canadian Caper in the early 1980s. The program will include a number of audio clips, video footage and interviews related to the story.

A first-generation immigrant, Mahmoud shares his story of pursuing his passion for independent journalism, documentary and podcast making. The talk will also provide a short background on

the subject of season 2 Radio Dastneveshteha: Ayatollah’s Spokesman, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a close aid of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was once a student in Nelson, BC.

Mahmood azimaei

Mahmoud Azimaee is the writer, producer and host of the Radio Dastneveshteha podcast and is passionate about Iran's modern history, especially the 1979 revolution. He started writing as a blogger in 2004, almost immediately after he left Iran. In 2010, Mahmoud Azimaee began extensive research on Sadegh Ghotbzadeh's life to write a book and make a documentary. Two years later, the documentary became a collaborative project with BBC Persian. It took until February 2020 for The Son of the Revolution to be completed and aired on BBC Persian for the first time. During his research for this project, he collected unique information on Iran's modern history, which became perfect materials for a
the podcast and led to Radio Dastneveshteha's birth in the spring of 2018.
Azimaee has a few documentaries in his portfolio:
Golbahar (2015) is the story of a photo on the front page of four Iranian newspapers during the reform period.
Siah [Black] (2019) explores the origin of blackface in Iran.
Mahmoud Azimaee is a professional statistician, and in his full-time job, he is a director at a world-leading medical research institute in Toronto focusing on population health research. His professional career and passion for audio-visual creation sometimes collide, resulting in videos such as Mr. Parkinson (2018) and Shredding Party (2023).