Murmurs in the distance نجواهایی از دوردست
Short archival film 2026
25 minutes total

in collaboration with Katayoun Barzegar and Behshad Tajammol

Murmurs in the Distance is a hybrid documentary that revisits one of the earliest feminist resistances against the Islamic Republic: the mass protests of March 8, 1979, when thousands of Iranian women filled the streets of Tehran and other cities to reject the newly declared mandatory hijab law and other misogynistic decrees. What began as a celebration of the first International Women’s Day after the revolution became a historic confrontation that was violently suppressed by the regime and its supporters.

This resistance was documented largely by non-Iranian journalists and activists, including Kate Millett. The resulting archive, photographs, audio tapes, reels of film, and writings, was smuggled out of Iran and concealed in Paris for decades, largely forgotten. Both the Islamic Republic and the inattention of certain Western institutions contributed to this erasure. Today, these fragments, both digitized and physical, endure as powerful testaments to women’s defiance.

Our film traces this silenced history through interviews, archival research, and essayistic interventions. Collectively authored by three Iranian women+, who left Iran in our mid-twenties and now live in diaspora, the project reconnects us with this pivotal moment in dialogue with the generation that preceded us. Together with contributors, protesters, documentarians, and witnesses, we work to restore these voices and to remember not to forget.

Between history and memory, chants and ballads, smiles and tears, we uncover a force that resists disappearance. Murmurs in the Distance is not only an act of preservation but also an invitation to reimagine futures shaped by collective courage.

Lost in her hair گمشده در موهایش
Short archival film 2019
7 minutes total

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 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.

Murmurs in the distance نجواهایی از دوردست Short archival film 2026 25 minutes total

in collaboration with Katayoun Barzegar and Behshad Tajammol ​

Murmurs in the distance نجواهایی از دوردست
Short archival film 2026
25 minutes total

in collaboration with Katayoun Barzegar and Behshad Tajammol