The eternal Sohrab Shahid Saless left Iran in 1976 to settle in Germany. His second feature film, Still Life (1974), had won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, and the obstacles to getting films made in his country--government pressure and censorship, still in the times of the Shah - were insurmountable. He was a pioneer in seeking out new film and existential horizons in the face of repression that would, of course, not end with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In recent times, it is in documentary film where we find a robust film community in exile. Distance as a catalyst for analyzing the wounds that have built up over decades of repression by the Ayatollah regimes, rifts caused by a government in irreparable conflict with a population determined to break away the chains (as demonstrated by the recent "Women, Life and Liberty" movement). 

This trajectory is clearly laid out in the extraordinary diptych that Mehran Tamadon finished last year, made up of My Worst Enemy and Where God is Not. The former imagines a fictitious interrogation in which Tamadon himself (exiled in France) confronts the Islamic police prior to a hypothetical return to Iran. The latter recreates the experience of three subjugated prisoners who suffered torture and coercion in the country's prisons and who have now found refuge far from their borders. Flight as individual salvation and as a way of preserving one’s cultural legacy is the subject matter of Celluloid Underground, in which Ehsan Khoshbakht turns the spotlight on a collector who hid thousands of films to prevent the regime from destroying them. Mania Akbari's How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish is another part of the film heritage, a sensational feminist essay built from fragments that run the gamut, from silent film to just after the Islamic Revolution, in order to show how women are represented, always under the male gaze, thus lucidly and defiantly calling out timeless oppression. The itinerant life of artist Sara Dolatabadi has taken her as far as Japan and France, the United States and Gabon, before returning home to film An Owl, A Garden & The Writer, a portrait of her father, the celebrated writer Mahmoud Dolatabadi, who lived through poverty, imprisonment and an unwavering resistance against repressors. The director fuses her father's writings and her own daughter's imagination as a way to show how creativity can be a driving force for surviving and overcoming the chains of a system that today seems weaker than ever. (JHE)

Javier H. Estrada
Member of the Documenta Madrid selection committee and curator of the programme The Jail Cell of Banishment: Iranian Documentary Film in Exile, in collaboration with Filmoteca Española