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.