Mahshid Afzali

While making a film about the Israeli-Palestinian war, an Iranian filmmaker is thrust into it himself. He is forced to flee Tehran with his family, and his political essay transforms into a twelve‑day diary of survival, exile and identity.

An experimental film about narrations of two journal photos from Iran's revolution in 1979.

After Ali suddenly leaves home, he and Simin separately try to find the reason for this separation before their memories are permanently faded.

On September 22, 1998, the Iranian poet Hamid Hajizadeh and his nine-year-old son Karun, whose name symbolically refers to Iran's longest river, were brutally murdered in their home in Kerman. The documentary film, based on the statements of the survivors, tries to sensitively reconstruct one of the many terrible motivated events that took place in Iran at the end of the previous century and draws us into the fateful day with the help of detailed shots of the objects in Hamid's study.

"Lowland" is the result of 5 years, daily communication with those who lived on the outskirts of Tehran, Saeed's dumpsite, and collected recyclable garbages of Tehran.

In the summer of 1900, the first film camera was purchased by Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar for Iran, and immediately the first Iranian moving images were captured by this camera. These images, in an obsessive manner, have embodied the mesmerized gaze of people. In the span of 79 years since the purchase of this camera, Iran has undergone two revolutions and two coups, and throughout all these moments, the camera has been present as the recorder of people's mesmerized gazes. These mesmerized gazes are in a way as if they are the ones looking at us, not the other way around. It seems like these gazes are trying to convey something, but what? No one knows. Now, we gaze at those who have gazed at us from a distant time.

Streets and places in Tehran are full of names that have changed over time with the emergence of various ideologies, and this has an impact on the collective identity of the people and the city...