Entangled for the First Time

Maryam Tafakory’s works are composed of excerpts from other films, combined with fragments of written text and shaped through live editing sessions performed in front of audiences. These archive-rich, labour-intensive live performances—which take place around the world—result in short films that draw from an extensive array of material. For example, her film performance Razeh-del راز دل incorporates elements from 64 films and draws references from 58 issues of the Iranian women’s newspaper Zan and 16 issues of Film Magazine. The process involves a deep engagement with the sources and the nuanced contexts they emerge from.

Reading about Maryam’s process, one might assume that the final result would resemble a chaotic flurry of disjointed images, sounds, and words. However, through Maryam’s delicate and attentive mixing, the film/performances become exquisite collages. Each excerpt, fragment, and reference is intuitively and legibly blended and projected, while never accounting for the whole story. These bits and pieces maintain their opacity, circumventing ever-shifting socio- and geo-political codes as well as the projection of an ideal other.

Entangled for the First Time features two of Maryam’s recent film/performances, Mast-del مست دل and Razeh-del راز دل, which will be followed by an in-process performance. Like much of her work, these incorporate select clips from movies produced in post-revolution Iran, where strict regulations are imposed on cultural production. These laws dictate that films adhere to religious and political ideological guidelines, some of which include: no sexual activity or overtly intimate touching between genders on screen; no criticism of Islam or the Islamic Republic; minimal violence; and no depiction of women without veils. Women are also prohibited from singing or dancing.

From the moving images shaped under these conditions, Maryam creates new narratives of gendered resistance, rewriting the censored archive with stories that will never pass through it. Her work not only reflects the complexities of artistic creation in repressive circumstances but also invites the audience to consider the resistance embedded in these fragments, to decipher the manifold of potential meaning within them, and to reflect on the ways they might extend into the audience’s own lives. 

It is both within Maryam’s distinctive process and the narratives explored in Mast-del مست دل and Razeh-del راز دل that we find resonance with the grounding element of this year’s theme, drawn from the final stanza from Gloria Anzaldua’s poem “New Speakers”:

We don’t want to be

Stars but parts

of constellations.

Gloria’s poem rejects the isolation often associated with being a lone "star," embracing instead the collective power of being part of something larger. Similarly, Maryam situates her work within a broader cultural and historical continuum. Utilizing fragments from Iranian films made after 1979, her live performances transform the suppressed, patriarchal narratives that were once home to the film fragments, offering them new meanings that resist the hierarchy they were meant to enforce. It is within her work that one of the festival’s central questions can truly find its home: what becomes possible when moving images, in their myriad forms, are presented not as isolated moments of witnessing but as shared practices of resistance?