Filmmaker Homa Sarabi maps her place in the world

Sarabi's inscribed pieces of parchment drape down to the floor in her office at the Boston Center for the Arts. Courtesy Jesse Costa/WBUR.

by Khari Thompson, WBUR

On the wall of Homa Sarabi’s office at Boston Center for the Arts hang three pieces of parchment, so long they drape down to the floor. Tracks of black and red calligraphy snake up and down the paper. Those who read Farsi will notice words for “right” and “left” repeating on the pages, corresponding with the transcription's changes of direction.

These murals are journeys etched in ink.

Each sheet tells the story of a walk the Iranian-born artist and filmmaker took with a friend, which she transcribed afterward. The catch: the two walkers were thousands of miles apart — usually with Sarabi in Boston, her walking partner in Tehran, and nothing but a phone and their voices connecting them.

“I was on a call with a friend one day, and I was like, 'What if we tried going on a walk together?' Because that's a thing we would do in Tehran was just walk for hours and hours. And I really missed that,” Sarabi told WBUR of the project's roots.

But these walks weren't just conversations; they were experiments.

“We tried to come up with rules that would make it as if we were on the same walk together. We're following the same compass. If I turn right, you have to turn right. If I turn left, we have to turn left. We are pretending as if we are walking shoulder to shoulder.

“... How do I create a map that is not just the streets that we walked on, but how do we map the connection we were trying to hold onto?”

For Sarabi, 33, maintaining her bond with Iran — the country in which her love of the arts was first nourished — fuels her mission as an artist.

From the time she was 8 years old, she'd already begun telling stories through poetry and film: “It wasn’t wanting to be an artist. It was just the thing. It was — that was my way of connecting with the world and understanding the world and finding my place in the world.”

That longing led her to pursue her MFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2015, and she's lived in Boston ever since, slowly building her home in the United States.

Her “Walk” series, which she began shortly after arriving in America, keeps alive the memory of her native land and connects her to family and friends who still call Tehran home.

“I'm walking down the streets of Boston, but I'm carrying what I remember from Tehran,” she explained. “It's like, how can my body exist in both places at the same time: one in physicality and the other way in memories.”

Such musings helped inspire her 16mm film work, such as “Tan/Vatan” (2024), which translates to “Body/Homeland” in both Farsi and Hindi. In it, Sarabi brings together two women of Iranian and Indian descent around a shared conversation about love and life, using the poetic resonance of shared words in different languages to weave an intimate, cross-cultural reflection.

Another film, “Home is Where the Fig Trees Grow” (2017), tells of Afghan refugees finding shelter in Sarabi’s family’s old home in Iran. Through intergenerational storytelling — her father’s 16mm footage and her own voice — it becomes a meditation on memory, displacement and what it means to make a home across time and geography.

Each vignette weaves a thread between what she left and what she’s building here — a bond Sarabi felt especially keenly in the wake of Iran’s conflict with Israel, which included U.S. air strikes on Iran.

“It was a physically intense few days, weeks for me. Hives, panic attacks, or different physical reactions that you have to the experience, and the stress,” she recalled, noting she leaned on her connections with other local Iranian artists and her work with the Bagche Farsi School in Boston to help her process.

The strain of witnessing the international conflict also served as proof of a central concept in Sarabi’s work: that our bodies are more than just flesh and blood. They’re our connection to the natural world itself.

That’s why Sarabi’s work focuses not just on connections between people and identities but also on combating climate change and protecting access to public space. At Emerson University, she has served as the director of production safety and sustainability and has been intentional about advancing environmental justice through media.

“At the core of it is this desire to connect with nature and finding yourself as part of nature, as part of this world,” she said of her environmentally focused work.

Nature features poignantly in her ongoing video film project “Crystal Lake,” which follows the saga of the ongoing push to keep the Newton lake open to the public. “Everyone in Massachusetts owns Crystal Lake. Not the people living in Newton. Not people who have houses around the lake, but everyone in the Commonwealth,” she said. “That’s a beautiful thing.”

For Sarabi, every project represents another chance to connect — whether with one another or the world in which we live, and whether we’re together in person or oceans apart.

Via  WBUR