In the summer of 2014, a group of six local women embarked on a participatory video project that documents their social and environmental struggles living on the outskirts of the western Lut Desert in Kerman, Iran. Six years and hundreds of hours of footage later, the collaboration resulted in a feature-length documentary film, a handcraft cooperative, and a renewed interest in qanat water management. As an anthropologist and producer, I worked alongside many of the collaborators as the video project evolved from a local participatory videomaking workshop into a transnational cinematic production. Like many other participatory video projects, the footage and workshops revealed the sources of struggle and stress of community members and documented the participatory video group’s efforts in addressing them. Unlike other participatory video projects, the filming occurred for several years among the group members and involved different levels of collaboration and ethical understandings between domestic and foreign partners. As other participatory video scholars have pointed out, there is a lack of information in the literature on the consequences of long-term participatory video projects and their lasting impacts once facilitators have left or the project has ended (White 2003; Shaw 2016; Pink 2007; Milne et al. 2012; Nygreen 2010). In this article, I intend to engage with the methodological practices of the participatory video project and analyze their efficacy in addressing the initial goals set out by the group. Based on my ethnographic findings, I will also be critiquing the politics of film collaboration from the local to the transnational, specifically in an Iranian context, while examining the unique positionality of these women as media makers, subjects, and spectators and its implication for feminist counter-cinemas.