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Mast-del
مست دل
The ominous howl of the wind whipping against the windows. A hand lights a cigarette with a match, abstracted into negative, in shades of blue. In her short video essay, award-winning Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory creates an intimate inner world that moves between the concrete and the abstract. Two young women lie in bed; one describes how she once met a man in an online chat group for film-lovers. The man worked in a shop that sold banned movies under the counter. Their meeting in the park didn’t go as they had hoped.
The story unfolds in short captions superimposed on a collage of self-filmed material and found footage from old Iranian films. Layer by layer, a moving reflection emerges on a reality that is extremely complex for Iranian women. Personal freedom and desires no longer exist in public space; they exist only behind closed doors and in the imagination.
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.
This is a tale of trauma, but not exclusively. The short’s overall narration does include that remnant of a painful past, but making it a story shared between two women gives us a glimpse of a present intimate tense. Mast-del, as a film about memory, is itself a very particular capsule of time. Most of the images have been altered in some way from their original form: using their negatives reinforces the haunting presence draping the film’s every frame.
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- This film was #44 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025