Exiled artist Farahnaz Sharifi uses old Super 8 family movies to contrast life before and after the 1979 revolution

Farahnaz Sharifi is an Iranian artist and film-maker who has been exiled from her homeland since 2022, and with this personal essay movie she ponders the fact that after the 1979 revolution, her childhood and youth happened on two planets: the outdoor planet of public life in which she had to wear the hijab, to appear sternly unhappy and learn to shout anti-American slogans, and the indoor private planet of home in which she could remove her hijab, relax and be herself.

Sharifi considers the happy, almost Edenic images of her parents’ good times on her Super 8 home movies and also on the (abandoned) home movies of other people which she buys from a dealer. Shrewdly, she points out that the Iranian home movies, like anyone’s home movies the world over, are about family parties, holidays etc. But this, tellingly, is why the films are being thrown away; they are dangerous memories of the time when having fun was allowed. They have become radical, samizdat documents: bulletins from the forbidden planet.