The Collective is a production hub for culture. We produce music, films, oral stories and histories that stand at the Black/African and Iranian intersections, in an artistic effort to fight racial erasure and be the culture.

The Collective started from the stories 8 year-old Priscillia used to tell herself- pained by the silences around her experiences as a little black Iranian girl in Iran. Decades later and she reached out to different black Iranians, Iranians of African descent and other Iranians, and asked them if they’d like to join her on the Collective for Black Iranians. In 2020, the Collective was born and focused mainly on breaking the silences and educating. Today, the Collective is working on sustaining productions of culture, through music, art and film.

Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda
Founder x Creative Director x Producer

Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda is an award winning Congolese Iranian filmmaker (Where My Memory Began, We Will Be Who We Are), founder and creative director at the Collective for Black Iranians and co-founder and advisory board member of House of Salone, a production and creative agency that advises on critically conscious storytelling. A recovering human rights lawyer, Priscillia has worked with the UN in war affected countries negotiating the release of child soldiers in armed groups and implementing reintegration programming.

Priscillia’s visual storytelling is grounded in ancestral memory, intersectionality and Blackness to lyrically bear witness to Black life in its varied diasporic iterations.

Her first film, Where My Memory Began, a short lyrical film that tells the story of a 400-year-old Cotton tree that falls and that of an elder who returns to what’s left and tries to remember, premiered all over the world to critical acclaim (Locarno, HotDocs, NYAFF, PAFF, Aspen Shortsfest). Priscillia’s latest short film, We Will Be Who We Are won Best Experimental at BAFTA qualifying film festival, Aesthetica and continues to be celebrated (Vogue selection for “Women by Women”, NY African Film Festival, XPOSED, Festival Internacional de Curtas de São Paulo, Pan African Film Festival).

She is currently working on two documentary projects, A Black Girl, from Iran, and Queens of Freetown, Searching for FannyAnn.

Priscillia is also a PhD candidate at Cape Town University with the departments of African Feminist Studies and Fine Arts where she focuses on blackness in Iran. She holds dual International Law and Business degrees from Sorbonne Law, ESSEC Business School, NYU Law and is a USC Film school drop-out.

Her work as a storyteller has been written about in multiple outlets, Screendaily, Variety, AlJazeera, AJ+, BBC World, BBC, Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality, etc.

Priscillia lives between Sierra Leone and South Africa where she balances her filmmaking, research, the Collective for Black Iranians with productions and narrative consulting for the UN. She is a 2026 Berlinale Talents in film directing and writing, 2024 Atlantic Fellow on Racial Equity (AFRE 2024) and a United Nations 2020 Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD 2020).

Alex Eskandarkhah
Co-founder

Alex Eskandarkhah is a DGC-nominated director, actor and entrepreneur. His work is grounded in inquiry and cinematic rigor, examining how power, migration, and society are constructed, contested, and inherited, particularly through lived experience.

Growing up in inner-city Toronto, Alex developed a holistic sensibility that resists partial truths and inherited binaries. His work repeatedly returns to questions of meritocracy, power, and migration, interrogating the psychological and cultural costs of systems that reward survival while denying wholeness. 

Alex’s creative trajectory emerged from long-form dialogue and community media, producing over 100 episodes of The Gifted Gab, before transitioning into cinematic storytelling. He made his broadcast-hour directorial debut with Coaching While Black, now available on Prime Video, and has since directed narrative and documentary films supported by Canadian arts councils, broadcasters, and festivals. His short film Cycles premiered at the 2025 Edmonton International Film Festival, followed by recent works including Letter of Intent, the TELUS Originals documentary Between the Bells: From the Middle of Nowhere, and Always Tomorrow, shot on celluloid.

With a long-view approach to cinema, Alex represents a next generation of filmmakers committed to intellectual depth, formal discipline, and cultural stewardship. A selection of the European Film Market Toolbox program and a Reelworld Screen Institute Emerging 20 alumnus, he is currently developing his first narrative feature while building a body of work intended to leave audiences thinking, questioning, and in dialogue, where transformation, both personal and collective, begins.