Women’s Role in Iranian Cinema

'You all have lost a woman, you all are looking for your lost one.'

(B. Beyzaie, Fath Nameh Kalat)

Dir. Tahmineh Milani, Yeki Az Mā Do Nafar (One of Our Two), 2011.

by Niloofar Beyzaie, IranDokht

In February 1994, Ms. Niloofar Bayzaie gave a lecture titled “A Look at Women’s Role in Iranian Cinema” in Frankfort. Ms. Beyzaie graciously provided us with a written version of her lecture. Due to limited space in the magazine, we will provide only parts of her text here. Another friend and colleague, Jamileh Nedaee, also discussed women's cinema in the same seminar, and we hope to publish her lecture as well in the future.

The movie camera is a tool to record images. It searches the world to find and select particular subjects. The camera focuses on personal problems and displays what it finds to the audience, which. Is then obligated to see what the camera shows. With that in mind, when a male filmmaker directs a female actor, he focuses only on those aspects of women that are important and worthwhile to him. Therefore, the female character is influenced by the director’s own stereotypes. Now let’s look at a female filmmaker directing a female actor. Under this theory, a female director would portray women differently than a male director. Does this actually occur?

In reality, not every woman filmmaker is capable of creating work that truly defends women’s rights. Additionally, most movies made by men are extremely anti-feminine, since our patriarchal society emphasizes the power and capabilities of men and the weakness and incapability of women. Studying the roots and causes of this problem is not within the scope of our discussion.

A Brief Look at the Post-Revolutionary Cinema

The dominant image of women in post-revolutionary cinema is that of a tempting, seductive and dangerous person.

Muslima: Muslim Women's Art and Voices Featured at IMOW Exhibition

by Samina Ali, The Huffington Post

As the curator for the International Museum of Women’s new global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, the one question I’m repeatedly asked is, “What common trait do Muslim women artists and leaders around the world share that strikes you?”

My answer: their courage.

The sad reality is that many of us have grown accustomed to –and comfortable with –seeing Muslim women portrayed as victims.

Yet brave women around the world undertake heroic acts every day. Many do so without anyone bearing witness.

 

From Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian's series "Nil, Nil," included in the International Museum of Women’s online exhibition at muslima.imow.org. Courtesy Shadi Ghadiria and The Huffington Post

To even out that ledger, I want to share the heroic stories of three women I interviewed for Muslima. It’s just a small glimpse of what you’ll see in the upcoming exhibition, which just launched.

Dr. Shirin Ebadi is the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. For more than 40 years, Dr. Ebadi has worked to improve the lives of women and children in Iran.

It’s a Man’s World

Interview with Shurooq Amin, Kuwait’s Rebel with a Cause

Shurooq Amin, My Harem in Heaven, Image courtesy REORIENT

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

On March 5, 2012, just three hours after opening, Shurooq Amin’s highly anticipated exhibition at Kuwait’s AI M. Gallery, It’s a Man’s World, was shut down. Commencing at 8 PM, the exhibition attracted a large number of people, and Amin managed to sell a few pieces, although by 10 PM, the local police stormed the scene, and began questioning both Amin and the gallery owner. Apparently, the authorities had been informed that Amin’s work was of a ‘pornographic’ nature, and as such, could not be shown in Kuwait. As the evening progressed, more and more officials arrived at the galleries, taking pictures of Amin’s paintings to send to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce. Needless to say, in the end all of Amin’s paintings were taken down, and the exhibition was cancelled.

Although various accounts of the incident exist in both Arab and Western media, I talked to the woman behind the paintings herself, to hear her side of the story. As Amin would say, this is the story heard straight from the horse’s mouth!

Your Veil Is a Battleground

A girl with dyed blonde hair at Tasua parade in the Jolfa neighborhood in Tehran. 2011. Image courtesy Kiana Hayeri

by James Estrin, Lens, NYTimes

Kiana Hayeri grew up in Tehran, where the country’s morality police restricted her public behavior. She left in 2005 when she was 17 and moved to Toronto, where she studied photography at Ryerson University.

Ms. Hayeri returned to Iran in 2010 to explore the dual lives of many young women who are expected to behave and dress modestly in public by covering their hair, arms and legs. But behind closed doors, these women act very much like Ms. Hayeri’s Canadian friends — dating, singing, studying ballet and even swimming.

“Everything that is banned by the government is being practiced, but behind closed doors,” said Ms. Hayeri, 24. “I think that my generation is exposed to the West through satellite and Internet so much that they don’t let the restrictions stop them.”

The young women she has photographed come from mostly middle- and upper-middle class religious families, though many of them are not religious themselves. Some of their parents were either relatively lenient or they found a way to dress conservatively when they left home but changed their clothing afterward.

Ms. Hayeri does not claim that her project represents the entirety of Iran. But she said there are many young people in the big cities who yearn for a less constricting public life.

“It’s a whole world that many Americans are unaware of,” she said. “Nowadays, with all this talk about war, sanctions and nuclear weapons, people tend to forget about ordinary people, the actual people who live in Iran, and they only look at the government.”

'The Other Resurrection': Storytelling through images

The exhibition The Other Resurrection runs until May 30 at Contemporary Art Platform (CAP), Kuwait. This stunning photography exhibition gives a chance to explore the work of the Middle East’s best photographers. They take you on a journey with their poignant images and their visual stories are powerful, haunting and heart wrenching to say the least. In the current exhibition, 40 outstanding images have been selected from the works of six distinguished female photographers, each with her own process, technique and source of inspiration. The featured photographers are:  Laura Boushnak (Palestine), Myriam Abdelaziz (Egypt), Tamara Abdul Hadi (Iraq), Tanya Habjouqa (Jordan), Dalia Khamissy (Lebanon) and Newsha Tavakolian (Iran).

‘Rawiya’ is an Arabic word, which when translated means, “She who tells a story”.  The collective comprises of a group of six female photographers from across the Middle East and made its official debut at the Format Festival in Derby, UK, in March 2011.

Speaking through images, when words fail, these photographers from the Middle East attempt the return to a past that no longer exists and the departure into a future that remains unknown. In their very own words, “They present an insider’s view of a region in flux, balancing its contradictions while reflecting on social and political issues and stereotypes.”

With an artist’s eye, they eloquently capture their visual stories that offer representations against and beyond the stereotypes. The images reflect their diverse perceptions as they successfully explore issues of identity crises, sexual awakening, the literacy crisis and the unconventional graffiti and street art in Egypt and provide insight on the struggles, triumphs, and aspirations.

These women are not only truly remarkable photographers, but their dedication to chronicle the known and the unknown, the forgotten and the oblivious, is commendable.

Sonic Solidarity

An interview with Iranian artist Shahrzad Arshadi
by Stefan Christoff, Art Threat

Portrait of artist Shahrzad Arshadi by Thien V (Montreal, March 2012).

It Is Only Sound That Remains is a sound theatre performance by artist Shahrzad Arshadi, meditating on the life and death of Ziba Kazemi, also known as Zahra Kazemi.

The story of Kazemi’s 2003 death in Iran, the ensuing Canada-Iran diplomatic fallout and the ongoing struggle for justice in the case, led by Kazemi’s son Stephan Hachemi, is relatively well known in Canada.

Kazemi was arrested for taking photographs at a student protest outside Evin Prison in Tehran, a major jail for political prisoners in Iran.

Students were protesting for political change in the country, highlighting issues such as freedom of the press, access to education and youth unemployment, and demanding the release of political prisoners. Protesters in Iran were facing serious state repression at the time; many were arrested without charge, often disappearing for days after being apprehended by state security forces.

Remembering the 2003 student protests in Iran is important because of the role they played in creating the political ground work for major protests against the presidential election in 2009, an election that many both inside and outside of Iran, including Amnesty International, criticize as undemocratic.

Feminism Manifested in Art

By Roxana Marcoci

To speak about the feminist epistemes of the year 2000, one needs to look back at the decade of the 1990s, a period when feminist practices related to visual and performing arts, theory, criticism, and activism became more dissenting and schismatic than ever before. While the pioneering Women's Liberation Movement of the early 1970s had a clear mandate -the construction of a distinct female subjectivity and the inclusion of women within the orb of cultural production-, modified ensuing generations to calibrate a clearly articulated oppositionality between "grass roots" and poststructuralist theories of gender, more recent feminist investigations have ceased to operate by any such clear-cut demarcations. In other words, since the end of the 20th-century two aspects have been problematized: the received categories of feminist art, and the idea that "woman" can be literalized in terms of a normative collective identity, a gestalt of some sorts. This being said, one should not hastily conclude that feminism, now fractioned and divergent, is bankrupt or in reflux. On the contrary, I would argue, that if contemporary feminists have less of a sense of themselves as a movement, it is because their power subsists no longer in a unified Pan-feminist voice, but in the disjunctions among their voices, in the differences among women themselves1. 

It is through this prismatic lens that I would like to focus, even if briefly, on three different practices which have contributed to understanding our period and concurrently have extended the social contexts in which these practices still unfold. 

Shirin Neshat - Turbulent

To begin with, nineties feminism not only jettisoned gynophobic stereotyping, but also probed sexual, ethnic and racial differences. This explains why, on one hand, feminism today is more likely to address all the clichés about what it means to be a woman -since as a construct (whether historical or fictional), woman is always open to investigation. On the other hand, it offers a much broader range of positions, not to mention realignments, as in the challenge posed by women of color to the authority of white women to speak for all women in general2. The sustained productions of the last twenty years of Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson are just few of the known paradigms. The same can be said about non-Western feminist rebuttals of Western hegemonic discourses.