I’m not a curator. It was as a filmmaker that I put together these programs to ask: how we can 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. Woman Life Freedom has become the most profitable and 
comfortable political stance in the West for those who choose to stay silent while Palestinian children, women, and men are burned alive.

I was asked to put together a few programs in relation to a series of my films — works that, in 
different ways, speak to censorship in Iran, and with what cannot be shown. I can’t write about 
Iranian censorship without also speaking to the discreet, insidious censorship of Palestinian voices 
across Western cultural institutions. It doesn’t always look like censorship: it looks like postponement, like risk assessment, like emails that go unanswered, funding and exhibitions that are quietly cancelled, artists that won’t 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”. 

Not acknowledging the political climate we are in now 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. 

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 now 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 doesn’t risk offending the ‘peace’ and  salaries of those who fund these spaces. When the artist is welcomed, as long as they don’t disrupt the show. As long as business continues as usual. 

There is no correct way to make films during a genocide, when maps are being redrawn in blood. 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”.