I am not a curator. It was as a filmmaker that I put together these programs to ask: how can we continue to make films when maps are being redrawn in blood, when genocide is documented on the ground day in day out, and labelled a “conflict,” when silence is repackaged as diplomacy, when Gaza is not named, when a genocide is called “the Middle East crisis”, when some of those given the largest platforms have never said a word about the most documented monstrosities of our Time. What does it mean to make art at a time that demands not neutrality, but a clear stance?

On the other hand, it has been almost two years since the Western media and cultural institutions co-opted the Woman Life Freedom movement to wash over their complicity with the same structures of power they claim to critique. Women's Life Freedom has become the most comfortable and profitable political stance in the West for those who choose to stay silent, although Palestinian children, women, and men are burned alive.

I was asked to create four film programs, somehow related to my films, works that, in different ways, speak to censorship in Iran, and show what cannot be shown. I cannot speak about Iranian censorship without also talking about the discreet, insidious censorship of Palestinian voices across Western cultural institutions. It does not always look like censorship, it looks like postponement, risk assessment, emails that go unanswered, funding and exhibitions that are quietly cancelled, artists that will not be invited again. It looks like silence: “don’t name it”, “don’t risk it”, “this won’t change anything”, “don’t ruin the mood”.

Failing to acknowledge the current political environment is yet another form of complicity. These programs bring together films from across the Middle East — works that do not seek to explain, nor translate. They were made with the urgency to speak up.

Toni Morrison wrote: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no room for fear”.

But what does going to work look like when institutions make a safe ‘political’ statement to appear progressive, but almost none want a truth sharp enough to destabilise the status quo? When being ‘political’ is applauded, as long as it stays vague and does not risk offending the ‘peace’ and salaries of those who fund these spaces. When the artist is welcomed, if they do not disrupt the show. If business continues as usual.

There is no correct way to make films during a genocide. But there is a choice: between the quiet violence of silence and the urgent work of speaking up and making something that matters. “This is precisely the time when artists go to work”.