Two years after Mahsa Amini’s death at the hands of Iran’s Morality Police, hundreds and thousands of women have taken to the streets in protest, chanting the words Women, Life, Freedom.
These same words echo across the globe and have found their place in Glasgow’s film scene.
Last November, the Glasgow Film Theatre screened “Disruption: Six Contemporary Shorts by Iranian Women Filmmakers”. Curated by Pegah Pasalar, Sadaf Sadri, and Iranian filmmaker, Mania Akbari, “Disruption” features narratives about female resistance against Iran’s Islamic Republic in a telling testimony to cinema’s power to reclaim the narrative. I met with the event’s organiser, Zahra Khosroshahi, a lecturer whose research focuses on Iranian feminist cinema, to discuss the inextricability between film and feminism in Iran’s fight for female autonomy.
The temperature is in the negatives as I set out to meet Zahra for coffee. Bundled up, I am reminded of my choice. A woman in Iran would be in layers too, even in summer. Before knocking, my eyes pause over Zahra’s office door, where posters demanding Ceasefire Now hang.
“I actually stumbled upon it on International Women’s Day last year and knew I wanted it in Glasgow”, she says about Disruption. The curation process started two years ago, a time-span coinciding with the uprising of the Women, Life, Freedom movement. “I was born in Iran and grew up in Canada. And returning to Iranian cinema as my research interest feels like a return home”.
“There’s a lot of very narrow-minded representations of certain people from places”, Zahra says. For her, what is shown in the media is never the Iran she knew. “Thinking of my grandmother and watching her cook or pray, or having a cup of tea while looking at the beautiful landscape of Tehran, [these] are nonpolitical versions of a home that I knew[…] and it’s these connections you have with the place that never make it into western media. This is not to sugarcoat what’s happening in Iran, I stand in solidarity with the women of my country, but I also reject the westernisation of our problems, whether it’s through the saviour lens or to vilify us. To me, film is a great place to complicate stories and show something that’s a bit more nuanced”.
Though geography is often used by the west to disconnect from the experiences of those far away, the selection beckons us to reconnect: we grieve with the boy who is slowly forgetting his absent mother’s voice; we share frustration with the mother explaining to her daughter that her father is not coming home; we are empowered alongside an actress finding her voice in a male dominated setting; we find hope in the elderly woman who reclaims the key to her kitchen after being forbidden to enter. In a society built to repress, these vulnerabilities are captured through minimalist visuals and cinematic conventions of the close-up and long take, intensified by pockets of silence for poetic contemplation. A space for intimacy to linger is opened between the screen and spectators.
Last November, a female student was beaten and arrested by the police for stripping down to her underwear in protest on the streets of Tehran. Following this, the Islamic Republic announced plans to open a ‘treatment clinic’ for women who reject the laws requiring them to cover their heads in public.
“What does it mean to disrupt?”, I ask Zahra.
“This is a dictatorship that wants to hold onto its power at any cost, the cost is human life. One of the main pillars of the Islamic Republic is this control over women’s bodies and to take back control is a massive act of disruption itself. Women, Life, Freedom came out of moments of resistance throughout the last 45 years […] to me the decisions the government makes [are] so out of fear of everything these women are doing. I guess the place of hope for me is how radical these women are and how it’s so hard to shut them down”.
Zahra explains women’s rejection of the State’s mandatory headscarf is a visual rejection of the regime’s branding: “The Islamic Republic stands in power through various forms, one being, of course, proxy and military; but also through the homogenisation of an Iranian state as all-Muslim. It’s a very narrow imagination of a very diverse nation. This is where visuals become important. We have the brave stories of women filmmakers challenging that very brand, looking at shattering that image that the Islamic Republic has been relying on for the last 45 years”.
The programme ends with Hair (2022), directed by Samaneh Yadollahi, about a woman who experiences severe hair loss. Despite her efforts to tighten her hijab, hair supernaturally ends up everywhere, and to her dismay, she is forbidden by the husband to enter the kitchen. What begins as a film about the punishment of women ultimately becomes about resistance and hope as she reclaims the key to her kitchen. The film keeps to tradition enough to adhere to censorship laws, yet uses simple allegory against the policing of the female body.
“Iranian culture has always been rich in poetry”, Zahra tells me. Iranian cinema is especially known for being deceptively simple yet rich in allegory. If censorship is used as a tactic to repress, it must then be in poetry that Iranian cinema takes form to resist. “Whose stories do we not hear?”, Zahra says, highlighting four of the six films embody the perspective of the child.
“In a country with censorship, the child becomes the mediator in gendered spaces, almost as if they are genderless. I think that the female figure does not have the same privilege of having the ability to roam around as free as the child does, [though] the child can still be a boy or a girl. Girlhood gives us much more political access to the gendered issues and gendered resistance of Iranian women”.
In a state where legal marriage age for girls is just 13, Disruption feels like a lament for a
childhood gone too soon.
How can we imagine a new utopia for women? I ask. “I think that feminism has been very singular in a lot of places. It’s going back to the revolutionary words of Audre Lorde, who reminds us of the intersectionality of our liberations. Feminism [must] be rooted in social justice for all. That means when we think about gender we must also think about race, sexuality, class, disability. So much more needs to be part of our pursuit towards what we think of as feminism, and utopia is when we recognise that what happens in Palestine matters to those who are in Iran and vice versa. What happens in Afghanistan matters. We can’t talk about bodily autonomy in America without caring about the Afghan or the Palestinian or the Iranian woman, right? It’s once we recognise the power in our collective struggles [against] a system in pursuit of diminishing all our experiences, identities and our dignity, to me that’s a utopia”.
The message is clear, on our streets and on our screens. Disruption by Iranian women filmmakers is a testament to cinema’s power to reclaim the narrative. And to continue the story is to continue the conversation. Perhaps, the truest of revolutionary acts lies in our capabilities to disrupt.
The Glasgow Guardian would like to thank Zahra Khosroshahi.
