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.
Sharifi draws a comparison between this celluloid material and the digital video of smartphones used to record street demonstrations and police brutality. With her own phone, or perhaps a discreet digital-video camera from inside a car (like Panahi or Kiarostami, she participates in the Iranian movie tradition of shooting within this semi-private space), she gets great streetscape footage of Tehran and the giant, surreal anti-American posters. I have to say that some of the more straightforwardly video-diary material about her own life is less interesting and a little more indulgent, but this relevance of what her camera is witnessing is real.
• My Stolen Planet is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 17 January.
