An Evening with Maryam Tafakory

Mast-del, Maryam Tafakory, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and LUX.

The works of Jarman Award–winning artist Maryam Tafakory are gripping meditations on desire, erasure, and resistance. Layering imagery from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, archival documents, autobiographical fragments, and found sound, Tafakory excavates speculative histories of female intimacy and solidarity censored by the state and excised from official records. Her tactile assemblages—swaths of saturated color, half-hidden figures, and text—reflect on the limits of representation while unsettling the West’s reductive understandings of Iranian life and history. She presents three recent works—Daria’s Night Flowers (2025), Razeh-del (2024), and Mast-del (2023)—charged portraits of pleasure and defiance in the face of coercion and oppression, alongside a special live performance that expands on questions of omission, absence, and memory.

Followed by a conversation with Maryam Tafakory and audience Q&A. Presented with support from the Walker Art Center. 

2023–2026, Iran/United Kingdom/France/Italy
In Farsi with English subtitles.
Format: DCP
ca 75 mins

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Maryam Tafakory (born and raised in Iran) works with film and performance, bringing together poetry, speculative nonfiction, and archival material to examine veiled acts of erasure—of bodies, intimacies, and histories. She is the 2024 recipient of the Film London Jarman Award. Her work has been presented in solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Barbican Centre (London), BOZAR (Brussels), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Los Angeles) and has screened at major international festivals including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. Tafakory’s films have received numerous awards (several Oscar-qualifying) including the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival, Best Documentary Short at the 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival, the Tiger Short Award at the 51st International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Cinema & Gioventù Award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. She was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence, a MacDowell Fellow in 2023, and an Institute for Ideas and Imagination Fellow in 2025. She teaches in the Master of  Fine Art program at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and holds a PhD from Kingston University, London. She is currently developing her debut feature film, Hospital of Irremediable Desires, drawing on ongoing research into illicit desires, queer disappearances, and women’s involvement in Iran’s clandestine revolutionary movements of the 1970s.

PROGRAM

Mast-del
2023, 17 mins
Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. The narrated scene cannot be conveyed through images. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.

Razeh-del
2024, 28 mins
The dense layerings of inky newsprint and appropriated footage in Maryam Tafakory’s Razeh-del tell the history of Zan, Iran’s first women’s newspaper, whose brief run in the late 1990s inspires two schoolgirls. Amid intensely saturated fields of amethyst, crimson, and amber, images of women emerge and dissolve, smothered in inscriptions quoting angry responses from male readers and words of support from women who dream of an impossible cinema.

Daria’s Night Flowers
2025, 16 mins
Daria has written her first manuscript about falling in love with a mysterious girl called ‘abi’ [blue]. The night flowers in her garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes.

ACCESSIBILITY

Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu.

TICKETS

$14 General public
$9 Students & seniors
$8 Film Center members
$8 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID

All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.

RESOURCE GUIDES

Conversations at the Edge’s resource guides contain articles, interviews, and other material related to upcoming artists and events. Available here.