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Films from Iran for Iran + Q&A
Institute of Contemporary Arts
A person with short hair stares intensely into the distance. Their face is obscured by a blurred figure
Pictures of Departure, Parastoo Anoushahpour & Faraz Anoushahpour, Iran 2018, 12 min., Farsi with English sutbtitles

On September 16, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, was murdered in Tehran following her arrest by Iran’s Morality Police for wearing ‘improper’ hijab. This brutal state-sanctioned murder spurred a new women-led revolution across the country: with women, schoolgirls, and their allies mobilising against veiling (mandatory since the foundation of the Islamic Republic in 1979), as well as countless other manifestations of the Islamic Republic’s all-pervasive oppression. 

Through this programme, we seek to extend solidarity to the struggle in Iran, and contribute some much-needed nuance and context to the long history of feminist resistance to state violence that has existed there, at the intersections between gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity. It aims to provide a corrective to the opportunism of big western art institutions, whose interest lies almost exclusively in the fetishisation of certain symbols of Iranian society, which have themselves been moulded by the Islamic Republic – institutions that foreground only those artists who reflect and reinforce this western gaze.

This programme includes six documentary and experimental films based around the idea of intergenerational exchange: between women and non-binary filmmakers with their mothers, their grandmothers, their 19th century queer forebears, and a new generation of loquacious girls at the Tehran school they attended decades earlier.  

Niki Kohandel and Katayoun Jalilipour will be in attendance for a Q&A after the screening, hosted by Elhum Shakerifar.
Programme:

Pictures of Departure (Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, 2018, 12')
Gut Feelings: Fragments of Truth (Katayoun Jalilipour, 2021, 12')
The Sparrow is Free (Niki Kohandel, 2021, 14')
A Week with Azar (Tara Najd Ahmadi, 2018, 11')
Dream of Silk (Nahid Rezaei, 2003, 43')
+ one anonymous film (7')
Programme curated by Another Gaze. More
 
Ticket information
  • All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
  • For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student and pensioner) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.

All films are ad-free and 18+ unless otherwise stated, and start with a 10 min. curated selection of trailers.

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