Short films by Maryam Tafakory, followed by a discussion with the director and Prof. Lelia Pourtavaf (NYU, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies)
Maryam Tafakory will share her practice working across moving image, text, and performance. Her process unfolds through long, unfinished research and gathers into constellations of speculative nonfiction pieces. She layers archival fragments, poems, newspaper clippings, audio recordings, declassified documents, and state-produced images to trace the space between what is recorded and what is erased.
Maryam Tafakory is an artist-filmmaker born and raised in Iran. Her research turns to historical gaps, unspoken rules, the various practices of censorship and to the bodies, stories, and histories that are silenced or made illegible. Her work engages not only with what is missing, but with how absence itself is produced, regulated, and sustained. Her ongoing films and performances follow these regimes of control, their internalisation, and the unseen architectures that hold them in place. In dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema, pre-revolution censorship, and the histories of women involved in clandestine leftist groups of the 1970s, her work continues to unfold as interconnected pieces.
Selected solo screenings/exhibitions include: MoMA (New York); BOZAR (Brussels); National Gallery of Art (Washington DC); Barbican Centre (London); Academy Museum (Los Angeles); Eye Film Museum (Amsterdam); e-flux (New York); Project Arts Centre (Dublin); Filmoteca de Catalunya (Barcelona); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of the Moving Image (New York); LUX (London); among others. Selected group events include: Tate Modern (London); Cannes’ Directors Fortnight; New York Film Festival; Locarno Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Villa Medici (Rome); Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York); and Anthology Film Archives (New York), among others. Her 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 IFF Rotterdam, and the Cinema & Gioventù Best International Short Film award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. They have also screened at NYFF (New York), TIFF (Toronto), and BFI London Film Festival. She was a fellow at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris in 2025, and a MacDowell Fellow in 2023. She was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence.
This event is sponsored by: The Flaherty Film Seminar; The Liberal Studies Global Media Lab; The Iranian Studies Initiative; Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies; The Center for Media, Culture and History; and The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
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