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Irani Bag
Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory masters different disciplines. She writes poetry, creates performances, and makes cinema. Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay that questions the alleged innocence of handbags in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In doing so, Tafakory provides a robust political analysis of censorship and intimacy.
Irani Bag not only exposes a sore point of the Iranian dictatorship, but it also invites the viewer to rethink their relationship to physical contact. It landed Tafakory the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Bio Maryam Tafakory
Born and raised in Iran, visual artist Maryam Tafakory makes textual and filmic collages that bring together poetry, speculative nonfiction, and archival material. Exploring the different registers through which images speak, her work attempts to dissect veiled acts of erasure—of bodies, intimacies, and histories. Her research-based projects consider what is often neglected and discarded as trivial or excessive. Her ongoing body of films and performances stays in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema.
The titles of all [Tafakory’s] films are composed of the original Persian with English translation or transliteration. کیف ایرانی Irani Bag, Tafakory’s most didactic film, is a rumination on the role of bags as props in Iranian postrevolutionary cinema and a prosthetic for touch under the eyes of the voyeuristic government that watches and controls. کیف ایرانی Irani Bag references a popular Iranian TV series, The English Bag (Keef-e Ingelisi, 1999–2000) that depicts the British diplomatic mission and imperial interference in Iranian politics leading up to the 1952 coup d’état.
The poetics of Tafakory’s work stem from her surgical destruction of containerised conceptions of knowledge. In their place, she weaves together references that form a kaleidoscopic interiority of postwar Iranian youth who came of age during a period of extreme state censorship and control of civilian life. The work is written and edited from the psychic and semantic strata of these juxtapositions, and herein lies the disorienting duality of experiencing Tafakory’s work in the West; not everyone is fully invited ‘in’.
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- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025