“What They Had to Conceal”

In this interview, Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory discusses how she abstracts and rewrites post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to reveal the queer bodies and untold stories forced into invisibility

راز دل Razeh-del. Courtesy of the artist and IDA

by Arta Barzanji, International Documentary Association (IDA)

Maryam Tafakory has emerged as one of the most original voices in nonfiction film in recent years, showcasing a body of work that is both consistent in quality and vision while evolving with each entry. Employing essayistic, collage-based, and experimental practices, Tafakory often draws on archival extracts from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to reflect on not only the repressive political regime under which she came of age, but also the restrictive audiovisual regime that frequently denies the existence and expression of female and queer subjectivities. 

In Irani Bag (2021), a multitude of clips reveal purses and bags as conduits of the impossible touch between men and women on screen. Nazarbazi (2022) examines the play of gazes in Iranian cinema, juxtaposing fragments of stolen glances, recurring sounds, and verses of poetry. The result is an impressionistic collage that forgoes a linearly constructed argument conveyed through voiceover in favor of an accumulation of details, fragments, and suggestions.

Tafakory’s latest works, Mast-del (2023) and Razeh-del (2024), further complicate our relationship with pre-existing sounds and images by abstracting them and releasing latent, hitherto unexpressed affects, trapped within.

In a testament to the hybrid nature of her practice, Tafakory’s work has garnered nearly equal attention in the realms of art, film, and essayistic practices, as evident by the range of publications covering her work: Artforum, ArtReview, and Frieze​; Film Comment, Senses of Cinema, and Filmmaker; Filmexplorer, Non-Fiction, and Found Footage Magazine. Tafakory received the Film London Jarman Award in 2024, the 17th edition of the annual prize, for “showcasing an artistic voice that is both profound and essential.” This interview has been edited.

Documentary: When and how did you become interested in using pre-existing audiovisual materials? What aspects of the archive appealed to you as a starting point for your own practice?

Maryam Tafakory: I have always worked with archival materials. One of the films I made as a student, I Have Sinned (2017), used found footage from Iranian TV and movies. My research during my PhD years, from 2017 to 2020, resulted in a series of videos and performances engaging with post-revolution Iranian cinema.

My relationship with this archive is filled with conflicting emotions. These are films I grew up with, films I fell in love with, and films I felt betrayed by. Engaging with this archive is an almost uneasy confrontation not only with my younger self but also with a generation shaped by these films.  

What brought me back to this archive was a sense of disillusionment that had lingered with me since my teenage years. No matter how much I cherished some of these films, there was an underlying sense of betrayal. It wasn’t just the misogyny or the absence of queer narratives but also the imposed and calculated distortions of our realities and the unyielding punishment of those who challenged social norms. Nearly all my films explore histories and desires that are forced into secrecy, and this particular archive offers much insight into the subject.

D: Does this interest originate from a cinephilic background? It’s rare to see a “critical” brand of cinephilia, which makes your practice stand out. More often than not, cinephiles tend to be preoccupied with reverence.

MT: What I’m trying to do is neither pure criticism nor reverence; yet inevitably, there is a bit of both. My relationship with these films is complex, and this complexity is what I try to work with. I’m looking at the imprints and marks these films left on us. By “us,” I mean my generation and those who grew up with these films. The rage that fuels my work is not directed at any specific films but at the conditions under which all these films had to be made and the subsequent obedience and complicity of cinema with state violence.

But, yes, this does stem from a cinephilic experience to some extent. At the age of fourteen, I started helping at an electrical shop in the Gisha neighbourhood [in Tehran], where we sold “illegal” films under the table. I soon began burning films onto CDs and making copies to rent and sell in various places.

D: What is your process for finding, selecting, and assessing the archival extracts that you use?

MT: My process has evolved over the years. During my PhD, I produced a series of stories that later inspired a collection of films and performances. Both Mast-del and Razeh-del were based on texts I had written for my thesis in 2017. At that time, I was writing about “unspoken prohibitions.”

There is always a lot of back and forth between my writing, readings, and archival searches. I always begin with a text. Sometimes, it’s a text I’ve written before that I have been thinking about for some time. Once I start editing the text, I take notes of scenes from specific films that immediately come to mind. Then I go back to those films and may end up watching them all over again for the umpteenth time. The rewatching prompts other ideas that take me back to the writing, then to the editing timeline, and so forth.

I know many of these films shot by shot. In April 2020, when I finished my PhD and my flight back to Iran was cancelled due to the pandemic, I began watching some of the films again. I had submitted both Irani Bag and Nazarbazi with my thesis, but I needed more material to complete them. I watched over 417 films in a few weeks, and later over 700.

D: Where does your exclusive focus on post-revolutionary cinema come from? Most of the extracts included in your works come from films that would be unfamiliar to non-Iranian audiences. You don’t usually engage with festival favorites, but with what we could call the mainstream of Iranian cinema.

MT: The focus on post-revolution cinema comes naturally; I lived with this archive. However, I don’t engage with festival favorites. The West has a simplistic and romantic view of Iranian cinema that I try to challenge.  My work is not about specific films but rather the practice of filming according to the written and unwritten rules of censorship.

Iranian cinema is often discussed in the West through a reductive binary: one simplifies and glorifies it for its “allegorical resistances,”  while the other denounces it for its complicity with state repression. I don’t engage with binaries. There is no reason to shy away from the complexity and ambiguity inherent in this archive. A concealed history is embedded in this material, and that’s what I try to work with.

D: While you frequently use pre-existing images, if I’m not mistaken, you often cut out the audio from the extracts you show and combine the existing videos with original soundtracks, creating an intriguing discrepancy. Could you discuss this tension between image and sound?

MT: I approach sound the same way I approach text and montage. They can rewrite images and construct a new story, but also help take us beyond the frame. Working with this archive involves an inescapable confrontation not only with what has been reproduced and prioritized but also with what has been left out or manipulated.

My rewriting of this archive is not about paying attention to what’s there, but noticing what isn’t—the missing bodies, the untold stories, the manipulated realities, the traces of what has been carefully concealed that mark every frame. The tension between the image, the sound, and the text creates a new space to envision an alternative archive of the stories that were never screened.

D: Speaking of sound, voiceover narrations are noticeably absent in your recent work. In their place, onscreen text plays a significant role in conveying information, stories, and arguments. Where does this preference for onscreen text originate from?

MT: I have used voice-over in several of my older films. I don’t have anything against using it, but I needed something else for these films. I didn’t want an off-screen voice guiding us through the images. I wanted the text to materially alter the images, to blend, rewrite, burn, and obfuscate each frame. The on-screen text becomes part of the image. It’s not an outside or specific voice telling these stories; it’s the images. There is a confession that I demand from these images. I want them to confess to what they had to conceal in order to exist and pass through the Ministry of Culture.

D: In Irani Bag, you use extracts from around fifty films to support a clearly defined thesis: that bags served as on-screen vessels for the unrepresentable connection between men and women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Meanwhile, in Mast-del, archival extracts are used more as abstracted textures than recognizable images in support of a thesis. How would you say the use of footage from existing films has evolved in your practice?

MT: I can’t provide a general answer to this, as it’s less about my overall approach to using found footage and more about why I chose a different language for each film. I play with language, whether visual, textual, or auditory. In Nazarbazi, poetry and silence were the only languages that allowed me to explore the covert layers of each image and the socio-political ambiguities that overshadow them.

Each project has its own language. I made Irani Bag as a prelude to Nazarbazi. My initial thought was to create a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema. Love stories in Iranian films often revolve around male jealousy, vengeance, and violence—none of which I wanted in Nazarbazi. At least, not explicitly. I believed we had seen enough of it. There is no shortage of misogyny and violence against women in this archive. It almost feels like love stories in our cinema are drenched in blood in the name of passion because other forms of intimacy are prohibited.

I didn’t want to reproduce those images. I wanted Nazarbazi to engage with the un-screenable intimacies of the same images that passed through censorship. And I wanted it to be felt, not shown. I was searching for the gaps and moments of transgression that were overlooked by the censors. I wanted my film to touch what these images weren’t allowed to touch.

To keep Nazarbazi away from the expectation of making sense to a Western audience, I made Irani Bag as an introduction to it. It’s the only video in this series that doesn’t feature Farsi text because what I outline is communicated visually to Iranians who are already familiar with the cinematic codes. I don’t need to explain to someone who grew up in Iran why the actress (Golchehreh Sajadiye) in Heeva (1998) is pulling the straps of her husband’s backpack instead of holding his arms. I offered Irani Bag to remind non-Iranian viewers that there are cinematic codes they may not have access to; what they watch may not be what they think it is, encouraging them to read the images with a critical paranoia.

D: Would you say that the ways you have abstracted existing images, particularly in your latest works, serve to subvert the controlled images produced and distributed under a regime of strict censorship and repression? Perhaps you are refashioning them as those “denied images” that were never allowed to exist?

MT: This entire series of films is about that. To abstract and extract, to rewrite and obfuscate images that denied our everyday and queer realities. Images in post-revolution Iranian cinema reflect not only the conditions that dictated what viewers could see but also how cinema willingly or unwittingly participated in enforcing state-sanctioned forms of love and violence. In a country where being queer is criminalized, cinema has a duty to imagine a world different from the one imposed—rather than upholding it. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Not only to offer new ways of seeing these films but also to construct a new archive that highlights the erasures, reminding us whose stories and bodies have always been missing.

More images here

See further Maryam Tafakory’s Haunted Iranian Cinema

Via International Documentary Association (IDA)