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And How Miserable Is The Home of Evil
Visions du Réel
2023
Film Fest Gent
Special Mention 2024
Glasgow Short Film Festival
Bill Douglas Award 2024
At the time of writing, early 2026, the situation in Iran is completely incomprehensible to the outside world, but above all, life-threatening for its inhabitants. During the protests in January of this year, the totalitarian regime killed (ten?) thousands of people. But due to orchestrated internet blackouts, communication is difficult and the official death toll is only an estimate. The stories that do seep through speak of a horrific situation on the ground.
Despite increasingly harsh repression, demonstrations of this kind have been returning in waves for decades. Will this protest finally turn out to be a turning point? Perhaps. “Something has emerged that is dangerous for any ruler: political imagination,” writes De Correspondent. The dream of an Iran post-Islamic Republic is not only part of the online discourse, but also of the protests on the streets. This is precisely what Iranian visual artist Saleh Kashefi depicts in their award-winning video And How Miserable is the Home of Evil: accompanied by an oppressive soundscape full of dissent, Ali Khamenei (finally) falls.
Kashefi figuratively attacks Iran’s supreme leader with his own weapons. Khamenei’s website hosts a huge online archive of propaganda. Kashefi appropriates these images. Their short film shows a lonely Khamenei, while we hear the increasingly loud protests on the soundtrack. With this anarchist fantasy, Kashefi, who now lives in Lille, wants to “play their part” in the uprising in their native country. The imagined fall of a dictator has rarely been so gruesomely relevant.
Bio Saleh Kashefi
Saleh Kashefi, also known as Filmsaaz, is an audiovisual artist working as a filmmaker and musician from Tehran, now based in Lille. Their short film And How Miserable is the Home of Evil received a special mention at Film Fest Gent in 2024.
“Islam naturally stands against the conspiracy between liberal democracies to dominate the world.” At the time of writing, this is the kind of unappealing hyperbole that Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, spouts in videos that can be downloaded in high definition from his official website. It’s a goldmine for anybody who wishes to misappropriate these online archives to corrupt their meaning. [...] With And How Miserable is the Home of Evil, Kashefi recounts the fall of a dictator in the style of a political drama, as if they were there to record the moment (like Peter Watkins’ reporters documenting the events of La Commune), by recreating a soundtrack that assigns troubling emotions to the Leader, cowering on his throne, awaiting his end, while the streets fill with whispers.