R&A Shorts: I saw my heart broken open, like a pomegranate

AV-arkki’s screening presents experimental short films by artists and filmmakers of Iranian descent. The works in the screening explore memory and place, inviting reflection on the role of art as a keeper of personal and collective memory, as well as a creator of new (sense of) space. 

Shauheen Daneshfar’s Scented Rooms takes the viewer to Tehran’s oldest theater, once a vibrant cultural space, but forced to close its doors after the 1979 revolution. Through poetic imagery, archival fragments, and reenacted scenes with actors, Daneshfar’s film aims to capture – and release – the spirit of the past era and the forms of resistance smoldering in the theatre’s depths, thus reviving the dormant theatre. 

In Azar Saiyar’s Helsinki–Tehran, a narrator born in Finland reflects on and dreams of Tehran. Saiyar skillfully weaves together various cinematic narratives, seeking to capture the (affective) knowledge of migration that passes from generation to generation. 

In Sepideh Rahaa’s In Transition, we hear poetic monologues exchanged between two women. In the two visually elegant and melancholic images side by side, the women knit words and meaning into existence, generating space and significance in the world for each other. 

Behzad Khosravi Noori’s film On the Dermis of History centers on a monument located in the middle of the Palestine Square in downtown Tehran. The sculpture is a memorial to the Palestinian struggle and, in particular, to the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 1987–1993. Khosravi Noori uses the monument as a starting point to explore the relationship and history between two hyper-politicised countries through artistic research. 

The screening is a collaboration between AV-arkki and Swedish Filmform, both of which are part of DINAMO – Distribution Network of Artists’ Moving Image Organizations. The title of the screening is a passage from a poem by Rumi, translated by Muhammad Ali Mojaradi.

AV-arkki