In 1998, two schoolgirls sent a letter to Iran’s first-ever women’s newspaper. While they waited to be published, they considered making an impossible film.
After Irani Bag (2020), director Maryam Tafakory began to focus on the cinema of appropriation in a systematic way, making iconoclastic collage-films based on images from Iranian cinema that she superimposes, solarises or mirrors. If in that film the object of study was the representation of relations between men and women in the post-revolutionary period, from then on the director has developed a series dedicated to non-representation, to what Iranian cinema has left unseen: free, emancipated and desiring women. Along with Mast-del (2023), Razeh-del deals with the love between two women. However, it is also a film about the first women’s newspaper in Iran (Zan – which means ‘woman’) and how during its short run in the 1990s it became a powerful source of inspiration. The saturation of signs, layers, excerpts, newspaper pages, intertitles, subtitles, text and photographs serve a phantasmatic purpose, summoning – as in a séance – the absent women to the screen. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
