Between advocacy and acting, 18-year-old Bardia Seiri can’t choose between the two. Instead, he’s utilizing both passions by directing his short, independent film called “Mama Sunshine.”
According to Seiri, the film is intended to discuss a common contradiction in today’s society: parents encouraging kids to not seek validation, while seeking validation themselves on the same platforms.
“I started out in a film class in Saugus High School my sophomore year. I met my friend Ryan Harris — he’s a year older than me. We didn’t really like each other or talk that much. Our teacher wanted us to work with someone we’ve never worked with before in the class, so me and him partnered up and made our first film. It was terrible, but we liked to worktogether, so we decided to do another project,” Seiri said.
From there, Seiri and Harris have worked on multiple projects together leading up to “Mama Sunshine.” The duo wrote the script, with Seiri as the director and Harris as the assistant director.
“We like to talk about social issues, specifically with teens. We’ve done distracted driving, phone usage, social media, peer pressure. We wrote it based on true experiences that we had, and on social media in general,” Seiri said. “I think what makes us stand out as a crew is that we’re lifelong friends, but we’re also all very qualified. A lot of my friends are tied to unions, so everyone has experience, but we get to make something together with that experience.”
Seiri, who graduated from Saugus in 2025 and is transferring to University of California, Santa Barbara, to study political science as an aspiring lawyer, also has experience as a child actor.
“My dad was an actor. I was born in Tehran, Iran, and my dad was a successful actor and director there — then he brought me into the film industry there. I moved to America (at age4), and my dad stopped acting. I’ve strictly now been working in Hollywood as an actor, and now I’m starting to pivot into professional directing and writing,” Seiri said. “One of the reasons why I don’t really think I need schooling [in acting] is because my dad is my schooling. He has so much experience — I also think the entertainment industry is such a risky business that I’d like to keep it a hobby until it doesn’t become a hobby.”
Seiri and Harris wrote the script in March, held casting calls in April, and will film for three days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with hopes of the film being released in late July.
“We’re going to send it off to film festivals. I’ve curated my film festival strategy to be festivals that really advocate for family issues, like Sundance, SXSW EDU, Tribeca and Santa Barbara Film Festival,” Seiri said. “Our main actress, Abigail Mansur, plays Chloe, the daughter. She graduated from acting school in London in April and during that time, I was casting on Backstage. I had about 150 to 200 submissions, but I couldn’t find that person to play the mother. Abby told me that her mom was an actress, and showed me her Instagram. She looked exactly the way I was picturing the mother.”
Wanting to find an actress who has a mix of warmth but can also exhibit hollowness within the persona, Seiri finds that Mansur and her mother, Samarah Summers, will perfectly depict the story and its nuances.
“I think what will make this movie stand out is the chemistry between the mom and the daughter. The story that we wrote doesn’t say that the mom is the bad and the daughter is good. The mom truly believes that she’s doing something right and expressing her love for her daughter on the internet — she’s just so hypnotized by the validation. The daughter is also bad at communicating, and maybe if she had communicated better, this would’ve ended faster. Both can be good people with flaws that contradict and create issues,” Seiri said. “Overall, I really think I have a passion for advocating, and I think this is just another way for me to advocate for people in an artistic way.”
