Saman Mustefa

Saman Mustefa was borne in 1996 in Kurdistan, Iraq. He started acting as a young child in the films of his brother, award-winning director Sahim Omar Kalifa. He has gone on to play in the films of many well known Kurdish and European directors such as Hussein Hassan Ali, Kamiran Betasi, Serio Tréfaut, to name a few. For his work on the short film Bare Giran/The Heavy Burden, directed by Yilmaz Özdil, Saman won “Best Supporting Actor” award at the Festival Brasil De Cinema Internacional 2020.
Saman’s insatiable desire to act regularly inspired him to start creating projects of his own. His first short film, The Unknown Life, which he wrote, produced and directed, garnered him a “Best Young Director in Kurdistan” award at the Rwanga Film Festival in Suleymaniah in 2015. Since then, he has written, produced and directed five short films. The most recent, Ido, was nominated at many int’l film festivals in 2021, and won “Best Short Film” at the Australian Int’l Short Film Festival and the “Best Short Film Award” at the Kurdish Film Festival Berlin.
When Saman is not acting or directing, he works as a 1st AD on international film productions. He speaks Kurdish and Arabic as native speaker (many dialects & accents) and fluently English.