AN EVENING WITH MARYAM TAFAKORY

Thursday, April 16, 6:00 p.m. | 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 materials, 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 an audience Q&A. Presented with support from the Walker Art Center. 

AWARDS & NOMINATIONS

World Premiere, Cannes Directors’ Fortnight (Mast-del)
Film Comment’s Best Short Films of 2023 (Mast-del)
Winner, Gold Hugo, Short Competition, 58th Chicago International Film Festival (Razeh-del)
Winner, International Competition, Pardi di Domani, 77th Locarno Film Festival (Razeh-del)
Winner, Best Short, Montreal International Documentary Festival (Razeh-del)
Winner, Best Experimental Film, Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (Daria’s Night Flowers)

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, In Farsi and English with English subtitles
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, In Farsi with English subtitles
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, In Farsi with English subtitles
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

CATE events include real-time captions (CART). The Film Center is ADA accessible and equipped with hearing loops; for additional requests, visit saic.edu/access or contact 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.

CONVERSATIONS AT THE EDGE

Conversations at the Edge is the Siskel Film Center’s award-winning series for innovative film and media art. From eye-opening screenings to unforgettable performances and talks, CATE is made possible through a unique partnership between the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, Video Data Bank, and the Siskel Film Center.