Still: Last Shot - Parham Rahimzadeh

“Why, in God’s name, do an Iranian and a Moroccan have the right to make a film about Palestinians?”

35-year-old writer-director Parham Rahimzadeh remembers being startled by the production coach early on during preparation for his new drama Last Shot (which premieres in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Tiger Shorts Competition).

The coach was Bero Beyer, producer of Oscar-nominated Paradise Now and a former head of the Netherlands Film Fund. 

Rahimzadeh is indeed from an Iranian background, and his producer and childhood friend, Karim Mrabti, has Moroccan roots. They grew up in Schiedam, which neighbours Vlaardingen, a southern Dutch town with a large Palestinian population. 

Beyer’s question forced him to be “very delicate and subtle” in his approach to Last Shot.

“Through the years, I always saw the struggle and injustice done to the Palestinians,” he explains what inspired the film, which tells the story of Musa, a young Palestinian artist fighting to get the final work of his brother, Samir, a photojournalist who was recently killed in Gaza, into a prestigious exhibition. He has received his brother’s camera and negatives which he develops in his cramped apartment.

Many of the collaborators on the production were Palestinian. Lead actor Muhammad Abed Elrahman, who plays Musa, is from a distinguished acting family. He is the nephew of Mohammed Bakri, the renowned Palestinian actor and director who died in December 2025. 

Mo'min Swaitat, who plays Samir, is a London-based Palestinian actor who used to work with the Freedom Theatre in Jenin.

“I had never worked with them before but we had sufficient rehearsal time to get to know each other,” the director says of his two leads. He also pays tribute to his “amazing” cinematographer, Sjors Mosman, who somehow laid a track for an elaborate dolly shot in the middle of a crowded Rotterdam nightclub for one key scene.

Last Shot can be seen as an eerie and elegiac ghost story. Musa imagines he can see and talk to his deceased brother, Samir. The writer-director is also drawing attention to the horrific plight of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, where over 220 have been killed by the Israeli onslaught since 2023.

The film deliberately has “a very isolated, cold look,” It is largely shot in apartments, galleries and office buildings - austere, impersonal spaces. Rahimzadeh cites work like Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet as key influences on his work. He strives, as well, to mix lyricism with confrontational social realism. 

The filmmakers worked with two professional photographers, Ferdows Faghir and Maria Bodrug, who provided the pictures that are used to represent Samir’s work.

The project is produced through Mohsin Films in collaboration with the New Producers Academy (the organisation founded in 2021 to boost diversity among producers in the Dutch film industry),

Rahimzadeh is a published author as well as a filmmaker. “I started as a novelist but I always wanted to make films,” he says. His 2021 book, Arab, is about an Iranian Arab growing up in a tough Dutch neighbourhood in Schiedam. The youngster deals drugs to make ends meet but is dreaming of a better life. Rahimzadeh hopes eventually to turn this into a series. 

His earlier short Doestet Daram (the title means ‘I love you’ in Farsi) screened at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2022. Now, he is developing a feature film exploring further some of the same themes in Last Shot. He’s also preparing another project set in the criminal underworld of Tehran. 

As a family man with three young children, Rahimzadeh has his hands very full. His day job isn’t easy either. When he’s not making movies or writing fiction or tending the kids, he continues to work very long hours as a tax lawyer.

“I always say that is the side gig I need to be able to afford my life as a struggling writer-director,” he jokes of what seems like extreme multi-tasking. 

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