Film Screenings / Programs / Series
FILMS FROM IRAN FOR IRAN
February 3 – February 8
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 has spurred a new women-led revolution across the country: with women, schoolgirls, and their allies mobilizing 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. Since then, hundreds of protesters have been murdered, with the particular targeting of ethnic and religious minorities including members of the Kurdish, Bahaiee, and Baluch communities; every day, we read news of another execution following a sham trial.
Through this program, 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 fetishization of certain symbols of Iranian society, which have themselves been molded by the Islamic Republic – institutions that foreground only those artists who reflect and reinforce this western gaze.
Organized and presented in collaboration with Another Gaze, a journal of film and feminisms, and the journal’s streaming project Another Screen.
