How can I begin a letter to you without anger? I’m writing as I watch your country being bombed. Homes reduced to rubble, fire, devastation. How can one not think of the ongoing genocide in Palestine – which you’ve spoken out against so powerfully – unfolding before the powerless (cowardly?) eyes of the Western world, of its newspapers, television channels, and complicit governments? What can we do when everything is burning?[1] Is it still possible to write about cinema? As Teresa de Lauretis once wrote, “the time for theory is always now,” and I see your films too as a form of resistance – a way of acting against the powers that rule this world. Can we still think, even after the violence?

There’s no other way to write about your films than in a tone of sharing, of affection. So let this letter unfold that way: I want to tell you why your films move me, why they are a way of inhabiting the world. I’ve chosen to write in Portuguese. Our languages don’t touch, and you’ll read this text in English – even if “lost in translation”. Perhaps we can start there: as Stuart Hall once said, identity “becomes a ‘moveable feast’: formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us”. He understood, with clarity, that there’s no way of seeing ourselves without feeling the fragmented plurality of our realities. It has always been this way, but today it feels even more intense.

I must tell you that when I first saw your films, I felt a strange sense of familiarity. I think I now understand what it was, after some time, in a tortuous way, I somehow grasp your fascination with the imaginary of Iranian cinema. When I was a teenager, I watched many Portuguese films on television. There was something strange that drew me in: something in their imagery, in their inner turmoil, resonated with a kind of sadness I shared. Perhaps, for the first time, I felt – without quite realizing it – that the images of a country say a great deal about our ways of living and, above all, about our disappointments. (I recorded many of those films on VHS, so their “faded” look, from the magnetic tapes, became part of how I saw them – particularly dark and seeming to carry sickness within them.)

There is a dominant theme in your films that seems to burn through us. While it’s true that your cinema stands as a political denunciation of the subjugation of women under political and religious systems, it is also profoundly sensorial. And at its centre lies desire. Of course, in the context of the images that surround you, there is a radical factor at play: the patriarchal and masculine presence that claims exclusive control over discourse. To a Western gaze – and while patriarchal structures are indeed everywhere – it borders on the absurd to watch and listen to the religious men in “I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin” (2018). Their preaching is pristinely clear, as if their discourse existed solely to occupy public space with a particular idea of desire. One says, for instance, “and don’t think those in Europe and America who shake hands and kiss too much, / and go to park and cinema and eat ice cream are having fun. no.” It becomes clear here that your cinematic gesture is one of resistance – and, in this case, by making the discourse so explicit, the words themselves begin to erode their own meaning. That’s also why it’s beautiful that your films show us that desire – which has been (was, will be) there: whether in the images of Iranian cinema or in the viral explosion of women dancing.

I sense – even more so when watching “Absent Wound” (2018) – that your cinema is made of words and whispers. What you say is shouted through cinema – through your art of montage – but it’s underlined by the subtle techniques of the written word and the murmur. The latent violence of men, which in “Absent Wound” is made visible through religious rituals, is dismantled, film by film, exposed – just like your subtle presence: your feet, your hands, your words, your blood.

touch without touching

I really love the phrase you say before the screenings of your films. I found it and will quote it here: “Over the last few years, I have opened each of my solo film programmes with a brief request: that the audience attends to what they cannot see, to consider why visibility may be overvalued. I’m attempting to distinguish between the acts of seeing and of witnessing, while encouraging viewers to read the images with a critical paranoia, assuming something is always missing”[2].

Images are, arguably, one of the most powerful weapons in our troubled times. Your sharp and timely analyses prove it. They speak, of course, to a particular society and a particular paranoia – as you point out – but I often wonder if this isn’t, in fact, a global collective paranoia, simply modified in its modi operandi. When I rewatched “Irani Bag” – perhaps the film that detonates your future cinema – it became evident that this absence of “touch” is a sign of a deeper terror: the touch that nearly happens, but is avoided at the very last moment. The scene of the desperate woman reaching out to touch the man, halfway through the film, is terrifying – much like a horror film, where the subjective camera denies us full access to the threat. In “Irani Bag”, we are always teetering on the edge of that contemporary terror: the one that has already accepted the absence of intimacy. The one that has surpassed desire (though, yes, you and I would agree, desire is never truly surpassed; it is merely repressed: could that be our collective redemption?). “touch without touching.” Framed as an almost “classical” audiovisual essay, “Irani Bag” offers a sensitive account of a society’s obsession – its taboos, its models of life.

when they banned touch, / we screamed.

“Nazarbazi” is a deepening – a complexification – of “Irani Bag”. Is it the film that finally offers us your cinema, fully? Composed of images that are less explanatory and more open to poetics, the film explores the potential of associative (and at times, dissociative) montage to probe the invisibility and silence of bodies. It opens with a burst of strong red, as if we’re thrown directly into the latent violence of these images. And yet, the film grants us faces, bodies, hands of many women (actresses) and the vivid potential of their presence. As one line says:“I am naked / naked / naked as silence between words / and all my wounds come from love / from loving.” It seems to me your films explore the point of explosion between opposites, or, better yet, the liminal space of life itself, where we feel most intensely alive. It’s no wonder we see so many images of houses and bedrooms – cinema, too, belongs to places and their affective charge.

At times, in some of these (early) essay films, I’m reminded of the archaeological work of Matthias Müller. His obsessions with the small, repeated gestures of bodies, hands, eyes, they are expressions of how the cinematic imaginary reflects back to us a reality, a kind of almost-horror game. There is one film I often use in my classes: “Home Stories” (1990, Matthias Müller). What I shared with you earlier returns: made from television recordings, Müller looks at the melodramas of 1940s and 1950s American classical cinema. The tension in this film is built through repetition – of gestures, of elaborate montage artifices, of sound itself. And all of this reveals how those women never leave the claustrophobia of their rooms, their homes. They are confined to their domestic roles, afraid of what lies outside. They peek through windows, behind doors. Danger is everywhere. While we could describe such a film as a critical exercise on cinema’s complicity in violent practices, the precision and economy of this piece make it paradigmatic of a particular idea of the image: one where a liminal space is occupied – a space where imaginaries (and ideologies) are imposed. And then, almost imperceptibly, the discourse begins to dismantle itself, its mechanisms suddenly laid bare.

Forgive the digression, but it felt necessary. “Nazarbazi” – which means “play of glances” – is also built through a succession of images of gestures and looks. It’s striking how you begin with a series of lamps being switched on or handled, emerging from the deafening silence of celluloid spinning through a projector. Within that “soundtrack,” all sounds burst – a guitar, a murmur, something shattering – but above all, there is that interstice between two bodies, between two hands, between women and the infinite. The films you show within this film are luminous – filled with fog, smoke, white curtains, the sea – but at every moment I feel we’re approaching danger. Is it the danger of desire? The danger of allowing ourselves to feel? To touch one another, to be sensitive? It is on the edge of absence and violence that the world plays out, that we agree to live together. I understand why “the blood” appears here, in your film, and why it will not abandon you (it was always there, I know). your caress would not carry the stain of my blood / if it was not covered in resentment. / if not then why when we kiss does my mouth bleed? Red, then, floods the whiteness of these films. Blood is the only visible trace of what has vanished – affection. The sequence of hands that nearly touch, or the hand that almost touches a body, or the hands separated by an object, it is deeply striking.

The sin of touch: it dominates our societies (in different ways, of course). But it’s always there: the taboo, the forbidden act. The eyes – the play of glances – cry out against this interdiction. We are human, and cinema – once again, this play of glances – reunites what it had previously torn apart. Let there be no doubt: your films are also a celebration of Iranian cinema. They show us that the conditions of humanity are still present – even if only through the intricate dynamics that a century-old visual language has invented. Can cinema save us? Your collage, as you name it in the credits, using overlays, negatives, layers of colour, is a bold montage that renders visible what censorship tried to conceal.

The invention of love
If your cinema has always been one of searching for what is there, even if not immediately visible, your more recent films make your own immersion unmistakably clear. “Mast-del” (2023) and “Razeh-del” (2024) emerge from your very core, and they are more beautiful and more intense because of it. In “Mast-del”, you use a technique that subtracts realism from the story, revealing images in negative (here, cast in bluish tones). This method – already present, though more sparingly, in earlier works – seems to heighten the urge to reveal[3]. Even if the images seem more filtered, they acquire an exceptional force. Of course, the images are especially powerful because they focus on the sensitive body, on fingers brushing against skin. It’s beautiful. Hypnotic. The (love) story you tell in this film is tender and tragic. A love story that begins in cinephilia — is there a more beautiful beginning for love than that? The poetry in your words never ceases to move me. Life only happens with words (and images), and you are their poet. The love story is thwarted by the police, by social customs, because love is a revolutionary act that exceeds thought. Love: a remedy that heals and poisons. This is your most lyrical film. And, I believe, your most personal (“this film was made with no funding”). The proof of that transparency lies in the names of those three women, their first names, written in the final credits (Saba, Fatem, Maryam).

There’s a key film in Portuguese cinema – a film of its time, built as an allegory of our dictatorship. It’s called “The Invention of Love” (1965) , directed by António Campos, an “amateur” filmmaker whose so-called ethnographic films possess immense power. In this case, however, the filmmaker turns to fiction: a man and a woman fall in love – they “invent love” – and are persecuted by the police. It’s somewhat naïve in its narrative construction, yet its metaphor elaborates a challenge to censorship and to love as a revolutionary force[4]. The urgency of Campos’ film mirrors your own: that we might invent love as a continuous revolution of gestures and touches. A revolution of affection, confronting the inhumanity of our time. Whenever I watch your films, a single thought keeps returning: Do the masters of the world ever think about human suffering? Do they care about hunger, fear, death? It’s hard to believe such masters exist. But the truth is, they only think of war. The masters of the world are those who “do not strike, but stand in a corner, watching the terror”[5].

which pain does film cure?
I don’t know where to begin when speaking about “Razeh-del” (2024). Should I start with the screenplay about to be written on the blank page of a newspaper? With the potency of the words found in the “Letters to the Editor” section? Or with the deep, aching desire for cinema that two girls search for? The story of Zan, the newspaper created by the daughter of one of the regime’s men, is complex – and all the more striking for that. All violent regimes eventually produce cracks – escape routes, sometimes from within the centres of power themselves. Is this a kind of regime washing that slips through the fingers of its architects? The truth is: this story is also the story of humanity, and the story of cinema, at the same time. How beautiful and how violent can that be? Zan = woman. Contradictions generate new, unexpected possibilities. Of course, within the context of a regime governed by censorship, “Razeh-del” tells this story through Zan, and through the systematic, precise, unheard-of ways in which a regime used cinema as a weapon to forbid desire, to police customs, to suppress the life of a people.

But if there’s something in “Razeh-del” that truly moves me, it’s the story you tell – your story. A story of love, and of a love for cinema. It is the story of an opening, a crack within a regime. I don’t know if I’m right, but the story of Zan feels like the story of your films as well. Of the subtle contradictions that emerge as consequences of repression. Of the unexpected creativity that arises in those moments. Zan is the story of cinema in Iran (and of Iran itself); it is the story of two girls discovering cinema; it is the story of woman (and of women); it is the story of desire; perhaps it is also the story of love.

At the end of “Razeh-del”, two hands finally meet, and a promise to gaze – endlessly – appears in the form of a poem. The final edition of Zan becomes the page on which to write a screenplay. To allow cinema to exist. It is right there, on that very page, burning with the fury of being imagined. The blank page is both a symbol of censorship and an open space for something new to emerge. There is something about this 1990s adventure – the era of Zan – that reminds me of “Taste of Cherry” (1997, Abbas Kiarostami), a film I also show every year to my students, to speak of a distant country where cinema absorbs the full ambiguity of being human. To watch a film about the wait for death is also to witness a quiet hope that the taste of a cherry might save us from a violent, indifferent world that seeks to strip us of the fullness of life. The drift of a man in his car, with no apparent reason to want to die, becomes a symptom of our own disorientation.

farewell sisters, farewell

Thank you for sending me your latest film, “Daria’s Night Flowers”. Watching it now forces us to see your cinema as an act of immense political strength. Daria’s story is, without doubt, the story of women and their unrelenting struggle against patriarchal power. She is submerged in the infinite gravity of that power, in its most insidious forms, whether overtly violent or not. Illness, as a metaphor for this power, precisely reflects the violent mechanisms of a biopolitics that governs bodies and their desires. The overflowing pills testify to the metastases of this hatred toward freedom and longing:“the pain of loving the one you mustn’t.” It’s an explosive film – but also a liberating one. Am I reading it right? The seeds sent in the letter are clearly a voice of resistance. I almost see those imaginary letters, those imaginary seeds, as your films themselves. They are drawn up from the earth, by your hands, to uncover a new becoming.

Your cinema might appear to be a cinema of archives. Of fragments lost to the history of cinema. A found-footage cinema. But to me, it is a cinema of the future, because it opens toward the possibility of a community-to-come. A community where desire, love, cinema, and the place of women are no longer subject to question. If conflict and violence are, unfortunately, always present, they must never come at the cost of a people and their annihilation. I love seeing the list of films you cite at the end of your works. It’s a list that identifies the pieces of the puzzle. It’s interesting how those lists begin in the late 1980s and stretch into the early 2000s. For our generation, the 1990s were a suspended decade. History had “come to an end.” A quarter century later, we see: there is no end, only endless circles of terror and decaying peace. If cinema doesn’t save us, at the very least, it dares to give us hope for the future. That’s what I feel when I watch your films: “of course, the future is important to me. / but hope for the future is something else.”

With deep affection and gratitude,

Daniel

Note: all italicised quotations are taken directly from the films of Maryam Tafakory.

[1] A slight variation on the title of a book by António Lobo Antunes – perhaps my favourite Portuguese writer – who has written so much about the violence and trauma of war. "What Can I Do When Everything is Burning?”, the title, is the final line of a sonnet by the Portuguese poet Sá de Miranda.

[2] https://www.frieze.com/article/maryam-tafakory-cici-peng-250

[3] Interesting how the word reveal (revelar) in Portuguese has a double meaning: to tell a story, but also the chemical process of developing images from negatives.

[4] In the film, a government statement says: “The Morality Police Intelligence Service reports that yesterday afternoon, a man and a woman met in a bar somewhere in the capital and, during their criminal encounter, invented love. (...) It is urgent to locate the fugitive couple who invented love”.

[5] You will surely remember this quote.