The cinema of West Asia—or the cinema of the Global South—has always been reduced to its locality. Film critics and historians of cinema rarely put US filmmakers in the same category just for being American. But Iranian filmmakers, even if they bear no stylistic—or even socio-political—commonality, are often filed under the generic taxonomy of ‘Iranian cinema’ just for being Iranian. Most film enthusiasts can easily tell apart the most indistinguishable French or Hollywood filmmakers (Godard/Truffaut, Varda/Akerman, Scorsese/Coppola, etc.), but even the most professional critics and seasoned cinephiles will not discern distinctive Iranian auteurs, like Forough Farrokhzad and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Only the people of the South appreciate the incongruities and details in these cultural productions and attest to the multiplicity and heterogeneity of their land. Not only do they see the plurality of artistic works within their country; they also recognize heterogeneity in the Global North. This affirms Fanon’s notion that only the colonized can truly understand the colonizer.

Our imperative is to demonstrate the plurality of art and culture in the Global South. The most effective way to confront the orientalist gaze, rather than creating and distributing this or that image of “The East” or margin, is to display the countless images contained within it. The western imaginary posits one “Middle East”, one “Third World”, one Iranian, one Iranian woman, or one Iranian artist. Thinking like this, whether sympathetic or hostile, remains within a racist, Eurocentric paradigm. We have countless Easts, countless Souths, countless Palestines, countless Irans.

This program aims to demonstrate plurality. The 10 films were made in Iran by lesser-known filmmakers over the past 20 years. They are either completely amateur or semi-amateur, and some have never been seen in any festivals. We tried to select films as formally and thematically distinct from one another as possible. Knowing any claim to the whole leads to failure as certain parts are inevitably left out, we opted for works from filmmakers of different genders, ethnicities, classes, and even political alignments. In this program, we encounter Iranian intellectual personas who read Kafka and Proust, child labourers who live under dire circumstances, fully fictive Iranian characters who only exist inside genre films, and Iranian youth who are torn by their gender and sexuality. Since the films are mostly obscure and non-Iranian audiences hold no preconceptions around them, the sequence takes the viewer through a panoramic view of the plethora of Iranian artists and society in the past two decades. Almost none of the films are explicitly political (perhaps somewhat disappointingly to Western audiences), but they all uniquely handle geopolitical, social, and religious effects on life in Iran.

We ultimately lay claim, not to these ten images, but to the countless possible images of Iran.