A text on how Nafis Fathollahzadeh’s Khabur (2023) reframes early 20th Century photographs of Tell Halaf, an archeological site in the valley of the Khabur River. Originally taken to document the excavation led and financed by Baron Max von Oppenheim a German diplomat, ancient historian, and archaeologist, they are transformed to speak to looting, displacement and alienation.
Playing with a film history fraught with codes and tensions, Maryam Tafakory’s Nazarbazi (2022) presents techniques that both conceal and illuminate, prohibit and point towards the forbidden in the same gesture. It is within the tension of this contradiction that the erotic emerges.
A text exploring editing as a veiling device, and the significance of gaps and silences in the context of post revolution Iranian cinema.
A text on Mania Akbari’s essay film How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish (2022)
that considers methods of interruption that invert the archive’s way of seeing.
