Murmurs in the distance نجواهایی از دوردست
Short archival film 2026
Single channel
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.
Monument Zero یادمان صفر
Book Publication and multi-disciplinary Installation 2025
double channel video
in collaboration with Katayoun Barzegar and Behshad Tajammol
Monument Zero is an exhibition and publication initiated by artist Katayoon Barzegar and curated by Niloufar Nematollahi. This multi-faceted project draws on scarce archival materials from the 1979 International Women’s Day protests in Iran to build a bridge between past and present feminist struggles, while envisioning alternative futures through collective artistic practice.
The exhibition features an audiovisual installation of a stone sculpture and video piece, marking the first chapter of an ongoing collaboration between visual artists Pegah Pasalar and Behshad Tajammol. The publication “Monument Zero” is edited by Niloufar Nematollahi and Jose Rosales. It includes previously untranslated historical materials presented here in English for the first time, alongside contributions from writers Shirin Karimi and Elaheh Soroushnia, and visual essays by artist Meshkat Talebi.
Cavities حفره ها
Audio-visual piano trio
In collaboration with Niloufar Nourbakhsh
Duration: 20 minutes
Cavities is a piano trio that integrates interactive visual, sonic, and musical elements, unfolding across five movements that explore displacement. The piece serves as a collaborative dialogue between sound and image, memory and document, and the spoken and unspoken sensations of belonging. Cavities aims to evoke the embodied journey of the displaced while simultaneously questioning the (im)possibility of representation itself.
In an era of mass displacement, where borders and the politics that shape them grow increasingly complex, pervasive, and urgent—where borders divide, scar, segregate, and uproot—Cavities seeks to slow time and act as a metonym, offering fragmented glimpses into some of the geographical root causes.
While the visual material is primarily drawn from the artists’ personal archives—reflecting a history specific to Iran—the piece aspires to resonate with a broader audience through its formal explorations and affective dimension.
In selecting the sources for our visual material, we aimed to evoke a historical account of events from the 1979 revolution to the present. Through associative juxtapositions of our home movie archive with publicly accessible archival material, this lyrical historiography unfolds in a gestural manner, revealing images related to oil and the history of the US-UK-backed coup that reshaped the face of democracy in Iran.
The first movement gradually reveals archival footage from the mass protests in Iran on March 8, 1979, against the compulsory hijab mandate. Emerging in a circular shape and conjuring the spirit of history, this footage—sourced from the film Year Zero, one of the few accessible moving image archives from that period—is activated by the score through amplitude. The trills in the score and the unsettled visual response emphasize the volatility of the image and the representation of history itself.
As the piece progresses, in the second and third movements, the visuals guide us through the 1990s and 2009 (when the Green Movement was sparked by the hijacking of election results), seen through the personal lens of the artists navigating their school years.
In the second movement, one artist is shown preparing for her first year of school in 1997, fully covered from head to toe, juxtaposed against images from Year Zero of women chanting against the compulsory hijab, activated by Metro.
In the third movement—a video montage interlude—a high school student, the other artists, in 2009 is depicted in a spelling dictation class, writing words that reflect the social context of the time: misdemeanor, crime, abstract concepts, eye sockets, conflict, and more. The montage continues with images of oil, aerial shots taken from an airplane window, and the same high school students attempting to balance on a seesaw made of an oil barrel. No image stands alone; each connects to another. The imagery of oil and explosions extends into the present, bridging past and present struggles.
This sequence echoes the history of the 1953 US- and UK-backed coup in Iran—an intervention by the West to prevent the nationalization of Iranian oil, which led to political unrest and restricted democratic access. Abstract imagery and archival material related to Iran’s oil industry, sourced from the Pathe archives and the film A Fire (آتش یک), serve as a portal to this period.
A Fire, directed by Ebrahim Golestan and edited by the renowned Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, documents an oil well fire near Ahvaz in southern Iran, where oil workers labor relentlessly, day and night, to extinguish the flames.
The timeline continues into the fourth movement, which is primarily a musical composition, with a brief visual ending showing schoolchildren in 2022 chanting "Woman, Life, Freedom" and removing their scarves.
The final movement is a lamentation in the present time with an eye on the past. A new arrangement of Amy Lee’s My Immortal shifts the lyrics' meaning in this new context toward a conversation between the artists and their lost memory of home. The visual material used in this movement is a confluence of all images used in the previous movements.