IRAN | shapes, sounds, lights and words
In January 2018, we recorded images and sounds over two weeks between the cities of Tehran, Isfahan, Passargad, Persepolis and Shihaz. Over the years 2018 and 2019, the travel experience hibernates, attends conversations, visits and intertwines with countless other experiences inside and outside the audiovisual language, inside and outside the academic, utopian, and therefore so real, place of speech, right to assert a south-south dialogue, between us from a peripheral West, equally targeted of stereotyped hegemonic constructions, and them, bombarded, nightly, by the tyranny of Western freedom. Between the burqa and the bikini, there must be a place where we will be friends with the king, beyond the girl from Ipanema, beyond Tehran. The main objective of this documentary is to break the stereotyped vision supported by the Islamophobic discourse, through a generous look cast from the underside of the equator, in which “there is no sin”, but starvation and premature death, of those chosen. It is about tracing, casting a thread of Ariadne's, a listening line, not mediated by the civilizing Eurocentric or North American speech that so much barbarism has produced for itself and for the rest of the world. The documentary walks through streets, temples, museums, ruins, but mainly through people, eyes and souls. Some alive, others stretched out in the tannery, here and there. Joys and suffering that bring us closer. Only us, and it is already us, here and there, western periphery and Islamic periphery, given to understanding. Afterwards, there were months, almost years of editing, new mnemonic experiences, revisiting images, cutting out memories, the cold blade of cutting and editing, creating the documentary film creature that has the privilege to tell about it all. Even though everything is so much more. Here is what is left, what has been reduced, compiled, compressed, a multitude of experiences, here and there, images, sounds, memories.