Contemporary experimental cinema in Iran has been well researched. Following the 1979 revolution, Iranian films in global festivals showcased a country that international audiences had come to perceive as “closed-off” from foreigners, “shrouded” or “veiled” from the Western gaze. Iranian arthouse cinema was celebrated as genre-bending: Documentary, or fiction? Amateur actor, or playful participant? As a new cinematic grammar took shape, it took a handful of Iranian directors to arthouse venues around the world. Today, a new generation of Iranian film directors continue to produce compelling projects within this cinematic tradition, creating films that are experimental, self-referential, often blurring the thin line between fact and fiction. This is in part because Iranian directors know what international festival curators, directors, jurors and art critics have come to expect of their work. In this talk, I explore how experimental documentary filmmakers navigate expectations of their work abroad, alongside local critiques of siah namai (black showing) films at home in Iran. Drawing from interviews and ethnographic research at film festivals, public and private screenings in Iran, this paper theorizes “experimental fatigue” as a response to the insatiable demand of the global market today. I also note the ways in which my positionality as an Iranian-American anthropologist affected my research development. In particular, Iranian state surveillance shaped the development of this qualitative research, providing further insight into the complex and truly “exhausting” state surveillance apparatus that Iranian filmmakers, artists and cultural producers navigate at home and in order to produce works that are seen internationally. While existing scholarship on Iranian cinema predominately contributes to the field of film studies by taking film itself as its object of analysis, this talk is based on ethnographic research and interviews with directors in Iran. Through these methods, this talk contributes new anthropological research to a well-established field of study.

This study explores the portrayal of masculinities in Iranian cinema, specifically delving into the challenges associated with embodying an idealized form of masculinity within broader ideological frameworks and the contemporary perception of manhood. The research will center on how Iranian cinema conceptualizes masculinity and will explore how the cinematic narrative engages with, and in some instances ignores, historical discourses and ideologies of masculinity. Through various discourses of modernity and tradition, the research aims to understand how Iranian cinema seeks to establish a workable masculine or an alternative understanding of masculinity. To comprehend the notion of masculinity, I have applied the theory of hegemonic masculinity by R.W Connell (2005, 2015. 2022). The idea of hegemonic masculinity represents a pattern of practices that are understood as the most honored way of expressing masculinity. These patterns work as acceptable mechanisms in sustaining unequal social relations. I apply a discursive approach in my analysis. In the context of masculinities, this approach focuses on how they are routinely performed or accomplished (West & Zimmerman, 2009). This perspective considers masculinities not merely as an essence to be revealed, but as sets of variable practices actively developed and negotiated in relation to other forms of identity within specific cultural contexts (Wetherell & Edley, 2014). Keywords: Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity, Discourse Analysis, Iranian Cinema.

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.

In this paper I center the work experiences of Kabul-born photographer, graphic designer and cultural worker Musa Akbari in Iran in the late 20th and early 21st century. Born and raised in Afghanistan, Akbari first migrated during the Soviet invasion to Iran and has since then been based in Iran and lived and worked periodically in Afghanistan. Building on empirical research in Tehran in 2015 and conversations with Akbari in Tehran and Kabul, I theorize Akbari’s aesthetic labor in Iran as an entry point to offer new ways of conceptualizing racial capitalism, masculinities and migrant labor. I show how Akbari’s labor (his)stories expose changing processes of racialization through which the labor of Afghan-ized migrant Muslims is incorporated not only into carceral states and systems of Europe and the Anglosphere, but also in the (re)construction of Iran. His work in Iran and how he relates to lifeworlds in Afghanistan during wars and occupations requires a serious engagement with the question of belonging for Afghan-ized migrant laborers depending on the particular geo-temporal configuration of war in the “host” country, in this case Iran. I argue that Akbari’s work with Iranian institutions, Afghan/Afghanistani diasporas and organizations in Iran unravels the conditionalization of citizenship, belonging to transnational Shi’ism and public life in Tehran. I introduce the analytic bearer of war archives to think alongside interlocutors committed to aesthetic labor and the question of archiving in the mode of war. The concept, I contend, rivets on epistemological and political possibilities that knowledge generating labor offers for political theory.