“We have seen how they ’freed’ Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghan women”

Israel’s attack on Iran

As Israel launched its attack on Iran, Netanyahu and Western commentators began to speak about women’s rights. Some of us may remember George Bush gravely informing the New York Times in 2002 that “the repression of women [is] everywhere and always wrong.” Filmmaker Maryam Tafakory’s work is clear-eyed about the ways in which liberation is used to justify oppression – something that, as academic Luisa Lorenza Corna writes, “feels exceptional in the ideological mayhem of our moment.” The pair spoke for TANK’s newsletter this week.

Above, an excerpt from اسم رمز CodeNames (performance), Maryam Tafakory, (2021–24)

First, I have a simple, but not banal, question: how are you doing, and how have you been spending your days since the attacks on Iran began?

I am frightened. One hand on the telephone, checking with friends and family, the other scrolling through the news nonstop. I managed to muster a bit of energy and channel my anger into fragments of writing when I felt choked with tears. It’s hard not to see this as our collective failure – not just the failure to stop the genocide in Gaza, but also the failure to stop the territorial expansion and the violent reshaping of the region by imperial powers that destroy in order to dominate. This is what impunity allows. We have gone from “free Iranian women” to “residents of Tehran will pay the price” in the blink of an eye. We have seen how they “freed” Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghan women. I am frightened for what’s coming, and I hope we can stop it before it’s too late.

My partner is Iranian, so I’ve been closely following Al Jazeera’s international broadcasts and receiving firsthand accounts from friends and family in Tehran. Simultaneously, I’ve monitored how Western liberal media frame the situation—and, admittedly, even read Trump’s and Netanyahu’s statements with morbid curiosity. I was particularly struck by Netanyahu’s decision to address the people of Iran directly, stoking antigovernment sentiment, and by his invocation of “women, life, freedom” in Farsi. It underscored the peril any feminism faces when it becomes too closely aligned with liberalism, as it often ends up supporting its interventionist drive. Perhaps there is no better moment than these fraught days to call out such false friends of feminism, and reassert its indispensable intersection with anticolonial solidarity.

I don’t really see this as yet another case of falling for media lies. We have a new world order: one that can witness horror, name and condemn it, and still do nothing. All red lines have been crossed. Saying an action violates international law means nothing now. The last 20 months have laid bare how quickly liberal feminism abandons the very values it claims to uphold, and the bodies of women in the Middle East have long been weaponised to justify bombing them in the name of freeing them. Last year, when Netanyahu sent a direct message to Iranians declaring that “Woman, Life, Freedom is the future of Iran”, many of us blamed ourselves for not pushing back harder against those in the Iranian diaspora who shouted the same slogan for 20 months while remaining silent as Palestinians were gunned down for a bag of flour.

The US invasion of Afghanistan was done under the pretext of liberating women from the Taliban. Iran was moving towards a people-led revolution, and that’s exactly what the US and Israel would never allow. They don’t want to see a democracy or a movement that belongs to the people, and this war is nothing but an effort to stop that revolution from ever happening.

One of the things I’ve always admired about your work is its ability to address eminently political questions obliquely, excavating the many-layered history of Iranian postrevolutionary cinema and recombining its fragments into a new filmic structure that invites viewers to reflect on the contradictions of the country’s past without resorting to bombastic judgments. There are many films we could discuss, but today I’d like to use Irani Bag as our entry point. This visual essay examines the role of the handbag as a kind of prosthetic for touch in postrevolutionary Iranian cinema, a creative workaround for governmental bans on physical contact. I find Irani Bag an extraordinary piece of forensic cinema and, unlike many works that focus on state power, places its emphasis on the ingenuousness of civil society in circumventing prohibitions and simply… living. To my mind, it feels like an homage to the possibility of organic, grassroots change from within, in stark contrast to the Western “saviour” narratives we increasingly hear in times of conflict. Could you tell me more about how you came to this idea, and what you hoped audiences would take away from the film’s subtle politics of touch?

I made Irani Bag as a prelude to a series of films I made in dialogue with post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Each of them, in different ways, explores systematic erasure and the quieter forms of censorship while challenging them. But I made this first video as a reminder, especially for Western viewers, that there are cinematic codes they may have no knowledge of, and that what they see might not be what they think it is. The film invites a kind of critical paranoia: a way of watching that pays more attention not to what can be seen, but to what can’t be seen, yet is present in every frame. The argument in Irani Bag is simple – censorship doesn’t erase; it does the opposite. Touch is not erased, but merely fetishised.

Nazarbazi was the second film I made in the series, and it’s about love and intimacy in a cinema shaped by prohibition. Once again, it tries to show how the rules fail, how gestures still pass through discreetly, coded, etc, and that the “unspoken” is nonetheless speaking. The film alludes to discreet forms of communication that both function within and circumvent the censors. But then again, over the last 20 months, everytime I was asked to write or speak about censorship in Iranian cinema, my first response has been: are you also looking at the Western silencing of Palestinian voices, while in Germany, UK, and the US, people are being interrogated and detained for simply speaking up – for fighting against a genocide?