Ali Ghaderi, English
November 11, 12:30pm
Galanti Lounge, Carothers Library & Livestreamed

People, especially women, of Iran have been in a five-decade-long campaign for their freedom and rights. This campaign’s news and impacts have reached other nations and peoples. Ghaderi has chosen to explore these events through reading three movies whose themes, structure, and aesthetics correlate with the aftermath of two paradigm-shifting nationwide protests, Woman, Life, Freedom and Dey-Mah’s Massacre, that brought about global consequences while people of Iran spent months under total digital blackout enforced by the Islamic Republic. Both of these movements witness violence being weaponized and industrialized against unarmed, peaceful protesters’ bodies and spirits. By focusing on three films, Gharderi identifies and investigates a lineage of gendered discrimination, intergenerational traumas, and political haunting, framing the present-day situation and presenting Iranian cinema as a global discursive arena rather than a limited and localized industry. The first film read and revisited is Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind (1976). It is a pre-1979 piece about the decline of
patriarchy, death, and decadence. The film was banned in 1976 and later restored and released in 2020. Reading and watching this re-discovered master piece sheds more light on historical consciousness and visual discourse. In the second segment, Kianoush Ayari’s The Paternal House (2012) will be discussed. Its narrative, happening over the course of several decades, retells a case of honor killing and proves that in the dogmatic and Islamic system of thought, femicide not only prevails but traumatizes generations. Lastly, Ghaderi will talk about Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow (2016) diasporic piece. It is a story about how the Iran-Iraq war, forced veil (which is still a form of oppression), and supernatural terrors form the grammar of a feminist horror. These pieces when read together, suggest that Iranian cinema not only performs more than just reflecting political ruptures, but also maps, rehearses, anticipates and theorizes them. Hence, this trio remains topical and relevant to these days’ concerns and arguments.