Aidin Halalzadeh, Sepideh Salarvand
, 2021
, 52 min
Lowland is an intimate portrait of a community of undocumented migrant Afghan children, living and working as garbage collectors in the margins of Tehran. Over the course of five years, the two filmmakers, Sepideh and Aidin, documented their encounters with the children first as ethnographers and volunteer teachers, and later as filmmakers. The film is…
November 2022
Shadi Harouni, Daniel Asadi Faezi, Farnaz Jurabchian, Mohammadreza Jurabchian, Elham Hosseinzadeh, Saeed Dehghani
AT THE DISPOSAL OF HUMANITY Curated by Lila Nazemian, ArteEast Special Projects Curator Featuring works by Shadi Harouni, Daniel Asadi Faezi, Farnaz and Mohammadreza Jurabchian, Elham Hosseinzadeh, and Saeed Dehghani. AT THE DISPOSAL OF HUMANITY presents films made in the past two decades that share perspectives from communities on the periphery of contemporary Iranian society. With…
Shadi Harouni
, 2017
, 17 min
Synopsis: Set in an isolated black pumice quarry in the Kurdish regions of Iran, I Dream the Mountain is Still Whole follows a lone figure, a Marxist dissident and former school teacher, recounting his struggles, hopes, and ideals as a committed revolutionary, all the while carefully negotiating the moonscape terrain of an everchanging mountain. The film is…
Daniel Asadi Faezi
, 2019
, 8 min
Synopsis: The dried tears of Lake Urmia in northern Iran are for sale – salt in plastic bags at the roadside. Once the biggest lake in the Middle East, only a fraction of it is left today. This is its elegy, presenting both its former splendor and its state today. Wavering between factuality and melancholy, the…
Farnaz Jurabchian, Mohammadreza Jurabchian
, 2016
Synopsis: Over one million Afghans live as refugees in neighboring Iran. For Ismael, Golagha, Kashmir and Nader, the flawed Iranian asylum laws leave them in legal limbo and under constant threat of deportation. To make a living, they work as ball boys in Tehran’s upper-class tennis clubs. Given the contemporary flood of images of refugees arriving…
Elham Hosseinzadeh
, 2004
, 15 min
Synopsis: Set in the era of the American invasion of Iraq, an Iraqi man undertakes the dangerous journey of crossing the wetlands along the border into Iran with hopes of safely collecting a wedding dress for his bride to be from his extended community.
Saeed Dehghani
, 2007
, 20 min
Synopsis: As Southern Iran suffers from economic and political chaos, employment becomes harder to find and a growing number of people turn to a new livelihood — smuggling. As this illegal enterprise becomes especially popular among Iran’s young people, filmmaker Saeed Dehghani offers a look at a growing part of the Middle East’s underground economy in…
Meyar Al Roumi
, 2001
, 29 min
Meyar Al Roumi returns to his native Damascus, eager to start making films, but he is censored. He draws inspiration from it to paint a portrait of the Syrian filmmakers most affected by censorship.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
, 2003
, 43 min
It all began with an e-mail: On May 22, 2000 a print of our first feature film, Around the Pink House, disappeared in Yemen under strange circumstances. It was a historic day, the tenth anniversary of the country’s reunification of South and North. We make films in an area of the world that is barely interested…
October 2022
Meyar Al Roumi, Hisham Bizri, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
WHAT EXISTED YESTERDAY MIGHT DISAPPEAR TOMORROW Curated by Hind Mezaina The past haunts the present in this film program about photography and cinema, featuring four short films by Hisham Bizri, Akram Zaatari, Meyar Al Roumi, and Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joriege. These films delve into a distant or recent past and their consequences today on what was and what could…
