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Nazarbazi
Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased in post-revolutionary cinema, alluding to discreet forms of communication that operate within yet circumnavigate the censors. The montage attempts to touch inner feelings, bodily experience, and our internalised prohibitions. The film uses poetry and silence as the only languages to grasp these socio-political ambiguities.
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 texts in Nazarbazi which, according to the end credits are sourced from the likes of Forough Farrokhzad, Ahmad Shamlu, Adonis, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, appear in terse, epigraphic form and provide thematic and poetic counterpoint to the images. Simultaneously, they appear without attribution and intermingle each other and with original texts by Tafakory. Unlike conventional academic scholarship where references are clearly acknowledged and demarcated, here they exist as an undifferentiated organic whole. What affordances does this organic poesis have for academia? With Nazarbazi, onscreen text becomes a site for another play of gazes, between videographic scholarship and video art and the question of how much these practices could possibly share the same gaze.
Although a careful cinephile eye can recognize the works of world-famous filmmakers such as Asghar Farhadi or Marzieh Meshkini (featured with her feminist masterpiece, The Day I Became A Woman, 2000), most of the films that Tafakory uses here are virtually unknown, as she splices images of hands that cannot touch, save for intermediary objects, of feminine bodies subjected to various shapes of violence, of palms that cannot touch anything save for their children’s heads and inanimate objects. It’s as much of a video-essayistic analysis of Iranian cinema based on free associations, as it is the transposition of a poem through the use of ready-made images.
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- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025