LOST IN HER HAIR(MONDAY)
Short-archival-film
The first day of school for Iranians assigned female at birth is the day the state definitively imposes gender upon them, as they must be covered in order to access education in its segregated schools.
Lost in Her Hair(Monday) compares and contrasts the preparations for my first day of school at age seven with my preparation to move to the United States 20 years later, capturing my shifting identity across time. Warm out-of-frame voices of encouragement highlight the aspirational goals of education, while my younger self’s playful recitation of the English alphabet foreshadows my upcoming displacement. Yet the very fact I was taught the English alphabet before my mother tongue’s as a survival mechanism speaks to the pervasive cultural colonialism of the West and its aftermaths. In this piece, I explore the difference between narrative time and story time, memory and captured image, and how a simple editorial cut can act as a temporal leap.
My childhood was marked by documentations of a lot of firsts. My family, sharing my aunt’s lone mini-DV camcorder among their whole big group, has decided what the pivotal moments to be captured for me were. I have often asked myself, “Who were they capturing these moments for?” Remembering my grandfather’s ID, with no birth date on it, I think about this footage as a way, an attempt, to construct or retrieve a rigid, tangible family history. On another note, in a family full of outspoken people who have had their bravery paid with exile and prison, etc., I can’t trace any encouragement for leaving any written or captured documentation of anyone’s actual life in our previous generation. The reason probably involves their early years - a generation of pride, of protests, of revolution. A camera trained on the tumultuous streets of their youth, a cinema verite of the people, turned its lens, over time, to personal moments, zoomed inward. And yet, looking back - watching a red skirt and wavy hair become a dark uniform and tight, covered braids - these personal moments drift move back to a political space.