Iran Zamin Cinema

This video essay is, first and foremost, a tribute to a cinema shaped by the gaze — while also carrying the feeling of constantly being watched. As film scholar Hamid Naficy notes, the recurring motif of gazes in pre-revolutionary Iranian films often reflected an atmosphere of paranoia: fear of foreign powers, but also of the Shah’s secret police.

At the same time, the video essay is accompanied by music by Googoosh — an icon associated with urban upper-middle-class popular culture, in many ways far removed from the left-leaning filmmakers of the New Wave. Yet this encounter creates something more interesting than a simple contradiction.

Perhaps it is not a contradiction at all, but a layering of meanings. Iranian culture — from Hafez to Asghar Farhadi — has long been shaped by double coding, ambiguity, and meanings hidden beneath the surface. This video essay tries to work in a similar way. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, it aims to provoke interpretation, raise questions, and invite viewers to look beneath the surface.

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