Daria’s Night Flowers
Spanish premiere.
Introduction and Q&A with Maryam Tafakory (filmmaker) and Margot Mecca (film programmer).
Daria's story is one of love and repression. It is the story of a country, but also of a woman who recounts a lesbian romance through the secret language of flowers and the symbolic power of archival footage from Iranian cinema.
To speak of Maryam Tafakory's cinema is to speak of a possible counter-history of Iran and Iranian cinema. Evocative video essays, mostly made with images from post-revolutionary films, born out of the lack of freedom and censorship in her country. A cinema full of invisible gestures and symbolic images, made of something which cannot be said or shown, in which the poetic and the political spheres merge. A cinema which denounces injustice against Iranian women, amplifying their discourse to that of any heteropatriarchal society in this world of silenced wars.
In her most recent and fascinating film piece, Tafakory begins with the discovery of Daria’s letters to her lover, Abi. A forbidden love. One subject to terrible reprisal and which is given new meaning through images of the past. Daria is the sea. Abi is the colour blue, a hue that floods the screen from the outset. The sound of the waves resounds like a liberation. The voice-over whispers a narrative to which access is granted through a hidden garden of affections that somehow reveals and soothes it. The images become imbued with the pigments of the flowers, entering a heightened state of awareness that transforms the screen into a tapestry from which what was unfairly hidden emerges. The invisible, until now.
Antonio Miguel Arenas
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