Participatory video challenges conventions of video production by centering participants’ perspectives through collective practices of mediamaking. This distinctive process opens questions about the ‘truth-claims’ participant filmmakers assert and how their representation reflects shared or divergent understandings of belonging, identity, and aesthetics. In this paper, I ask how spectators interpret participatory media, examining the ways meaning shifts across different social, cultural, and geographic contexts. I analyze data collected through focus groups conducted from 2020-2024 of the participatory film, “Women of the Sun: A Chronology of Seeing” (2020), a film project led by rural women in South-Central Iran. The focus groups included Iranian, Iranian-diasporic, and non-Iranian spectators and were held in Iran, France, and the United States. Spectators’ interpretation of the participatory film reflects divergent narratives of gender, class, and national identities that are deeply inscribed in spatial and social relations. This paper examines the ways visual media communicates shared values as well as divergent power relations within national boundaries and across international communities throughout the signifying process between producers and spectators.