Iran, My Love - screening #4

Irani Bag (2021, 8 min) 

Using excerpts of films produced between 1990 and 2018, Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay questioning the innocence of bags in post-revolution Iranian cinema. Irani Bag is part of Monographs, a series of essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive (AFA). Awarded Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award - 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Included in The Best Video Essays of 2020 & 2021 by Sight&Sound magazine – BFI. "Collating scenes of mediated intimacy in Iranian cinema, Maryam Tafakory's 'Irani Bag' is a quietly moving instruction on 'how to touch without touching'" [Essay Film Festival London] “A video essay that deconstructs a cinematographic motif in order to propose a powerful textual and political analysis of censorship and intimacy in post-revolution Iran. Irani Bag not only exposes a codified vocabulary, it also invites the spectator to reconsider the relationship to (and between) sight and touch.” [London Short Film Festival – Awarded the runner-up Best UK Short Film]

Nazarbazi (2022, 19 min)

Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolution cinema, and alludes to discreet forms of communication that operate within, yet also circumnavigate the censors. It attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch; inner feelings/sensations – but also untouchability beyond physical contact: unspoken prohibitions/regulators that may only unveil as embodied experiences. The film uses poetry and silence as the only language/s with which we can attempt to touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.

I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin (2018, 8 min)

What cures women of sexual promiscuity? Eating lettuce, of course, at least according to one clergyman advising women on how to control their lust, as seen in Maryam Tafakory's film. Placed in counterpoint, fragments from Forough Farrokhzad’s poem Sin are read and written out in a celebration of sensuality.

Absent Wound (2017, 10 min)

Making a stage from two public spaces in Iran which women are prohibited from entering, Maryam Tafakory’s depiction of men and women coming of age draws parallels while commenting on this separation of the genders. The authority of tradition is metaphorically undermined by obstructed onscreen text, while a woman’s low hums and whispers remind us of the presence of the body in the enactment of rituals.