Now the walnut sapling
has grown tall enough to tell its young leaves
the meaning of the wall
– Forugh Farrokhzad, “Window”

One of the biggest surprises of the 17th edition of One World Romania (which in recent years has imposed an aesthetically expansive vision of the genre) was, for me, to find Maryam Tafakory among the special guests of the festival. Presenting a complete retrospective of her oeuvre to date (eight short films and two live performances), the Iranian filmmaker has emerged in recent years as one of the most interesting and radical voices in contemporary experimental cinema, with an approach that blends the poetic and the political to the point of fusion.

It is commendable how she has used her voice in recent months to consistently draw attention to the situation in the Gaza Strip, as well as to hold the festival and film/art ecosystem accountable for its inaction: she has canceled screenings and appearances at IDFA, MoMA, and Berlinale. In the extremely critical statements she has made during this time, she has accused not only the relativism (or silence) of these institutions regarding the tragedy in Palestine but also the censorship of pro-Palestinian artists, pointing out that “the onus is on those of us in the state of precarity to do the dirty work, to speak up, fight and educate.”

Stylistic approaches similar to those employed by Tafakory rarely find a place in documentary film festivals, which often prefer to give precedence to established, straightforward formulas such as expository or observational. Recent years have seen an openness to greater aesthetic diversity, encouraged by the rise in popularity of montage cinema, and the Iranian filmmaker is among those whose filmography is actively challenging this paradigm shift. This makes this retrospective at OWR all the more significant – and for the inevitable rather stylistically conservative tastes, it must be said up front that Tafakory’s cinema aims at human rights, particularly women’s and queer rights, but in a way that is not programmatic, militant (per se), or often even explicit.

The Iranian artist’s politics (all the more necessary now, a year and a half after the popular uprisings sparked by the death in custody of Mahsei Amini – under the slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, Woman, Life, Freedom) emerge naturally from the associations her films propose, whether we’re talking about images of a space we come to realize excludes women, juxtaposed with a text declaiming the refusal to have children (Absent Wound), or a woman’s story of being harassed by the morality police on a first date with a guy she met online – a story told in an intimate setting to another woman, in a seemingly remote place, which allows us to infer not only a queer relationship but also the narrator’s flight from the country (Mast-del).

In a time when images are not only abundant but also accessible in the broadest sense of the term – for the digital age, beyond instantly producing its own image-document, has the particularity of bringing images produced in the past closer to us than ever before – a filmmaker like Maryam Tafakory has not only the sensibility to grasp this apparent paradox but also the creative force to translate this status quo into the raw material of a cinema that is both contemporary and reflective about the past.

For when we look at a film like Nazarbazi (2022, winner of Best Short Film at IFFR and Best Visual Concept at BIEFF), we notice not only how the filmmaker’s eye captures fleeting moments from over four decades of Iranian cinema (from Dariush Mehrjui to Asghar Farhadi), editing them into a new discourse, but also how the textual narrative she accompanies them with draws its essence from the tradition of Iranian poetry. Not an incidental dialogue: see I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin (2018), which creates a dialectical contrast between the Iranian clergy’s repressive attitude to sexuality and the verses of the poem Sin by Forugh Farrokhzad (1934-1967), the most important Iranian poet of all time (and also a filmmaker, whose career was cut short by a tragic and early death), considered by many as the figure who modernized, even revolutionized the Persian (poetic) language.

Farrokhzad and Tafakory have a shared poetic imaginary, that regards both sensuality – where desire and voluptuousness burst forth in intense outpourings – and darkness: a keen sense of entropy and decay born from the passage of time, but also of an evil (both malaise and violence) that, like desire, lurks not far from the corners of the visible spectrum. Ultimately, it is not at all wrong to see Tafakory’s work as one that continues the great modernist poet’s revolutionary aims in terms of the representation of femininity and female sexuality, a project that spans across generations: the oft-confessional, first-person narration is that of a woman speaking for herself in a culture that denies this to women, silencing and objectifying them. For Nazarbazi, who in turn quotes extensively from Farrokhzad’s poems, is also a reclamation of the female gaze on cinema – which implies that such a gesture can only be transgressive against the status quo. Also worth noting is the wider context: that of the canon of the New Iranian Cinema, a movement that has otherwise produced absolute masterpieces of world cinema but puts women behind the camera in the shadow – except for female authors with slightly greater international visibility such as Samira Makhmalbaf or Marzieh Meshkini. In this sense, Tafakory’s approach is also in dialogue with this aspect of a national cinema (and therefore a gaze, a representation) dominated by men – whether we’re talking about directors or the political factor.

What distinguishes Tafakory is that translation is an integral part of her artistic act. A translation that concerns both the fact that the text appearing on screen is almost always doubled, appearing simultaneously in Farsi and English, and the very relationship between word and image, which seem to act as mutual interpreters in her films. Of course, one should also take into account that Tafakory is an artist living abroad, having lived in the UK for over a decade (in her 2015 Poem & Stone, she speaks about visiting Iran after a long period of absence). What we see is a negotiation between video and text that takes on one of the fundamental premises of the act of translation (the impossibility of conveying the exact same meaning), instrumented as an artistic strategy: literature and image do not illustrate each other, rather pointing towards what is beyond both (whether we’re talking about political realities or intricate emotional textures). Also strategic is the placement of the text within the composition: unlike the vast majority of filmmakers (even those in the experimental sphere), Tafakory does not place her interventions in the lower half of the screen, where subtitles can usually be found, but rather, she integrates the text in various places within the frame, turning it an integral part of the image as a whole.

The way that Maryam Tafakory looks at images is as important as the way she looks for them. The images the filmmaker weaves into her films fall into two categories: archival images (coming from both cinema and other audiovisual sources, such as television) and images she films. Most reviews dedicated to the filmmaker’s work tend to analyse her “found footage” films – which have, in turn, led to critics also designating her as video-essayist: see not just Nazarbazi but also Irani Bag (2021), an essay exploring how purses become an Ersatz for the depiction of touching between men and women (which Iranian law forbids in local cinema).

But her other films, made by “her own hands”, are just as captivating. Academic language would call them “non-indexical images” (images that do not indicate what they want to express) – but I, for one, prefer to call them “interstitial images”: images born from the space between other images (see, for example, these grains of sand that gradually become a rosette of words in Poem & Stone), close-ups dwelling on a small detail of a whole (a pair of hands or feet, a woman drinking water from a public fountain, the floor of a bus). Montage thus becomes a tool for amplifying and multiplying possible meanings; while the poetic, in turn, invites evocation, a process that creates images, this time “interior”, “inner”, and “hidden” within each viewer and reader.

If Agnès Varda signed her films – in a manner that has since become iconic – as cine-writings (cine-écrits), then one may certainly call Maryam Tafakory a cine-poet. Her films are a superb illustration of the thesis that cinema is the fourth major genre of literature.

A full retrospective of Maryam Tafakory’s video works is screening this weekend at the 17th One World Romania.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.