April 22, 2026
On Maryam Tafakory
This absence, like the blank spaces in Zan newspaper, contains the potential for liberation. This absence leaves her films on the verge of collapse, but in doing so, it forces us to hold them together ourselves, and gives us space into which we project our desires, our visions of freedom. The silences in which the soul can take refuge.
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March 22, 2021
Life Must be Disrupted in Order to be Revealed: The Recording as Record and the Hyper-Surveilled Entity Not Meant to Exist in An Unusual Summer
A nylon bag dances across the gravel lot, crinkling, and the camera follows it. A gust of wind, caught on camera as a swirl of dust moving from right to left. Aljafari zooms in and follows the swirl, repeating the gesture a few times. Every day, at 5:13 am, a man in a checkered shirt walks across the lot to catch a bus.
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February 22, 2021
Soleil Ô and a Transnational Third Cinema
Third Cinema filmmakers see film as a weapon with the camera as an “inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons and the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.”7 The act of filming then becomes more than a political act. Third Cinema films do not aim to re-aestheticize traditional cinematic modes, but to rather politicize cinema to the extent where a new cinematic code appropriate to its needs is established.
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