Arta moved to the US from Tehran, Iran around four years ago and transferred to the UCLA film program last year. Although he is in the production track of the film program, he independently researches the cinema of Sohrab Shahid Saless, an Iranian filmmaker who emerged in the early 1970s. Saless was the founder of realist cinema in Iran and one of the early practitioners of the “slow cinema” style globally. He was a major figure of the Iranian New Wave, then moved to Germany and made over 10 films.

Arta worked with Professor Anderson at UCLA and Professor Varzi at UCI last spring and will continue to seek the guidance of Professor Anderson in the current year. He presented his research at the Visions 9 Film Festival and Conference in North Carolina in the spring and is currently in talks with Paul Malcolm, the head of programming at the UCLA Film and TV Archive about a possible Saless retrospective at UCLA sometime within the next year. The journal Film Matters is currently considering part of his research for publication in their next issue.