نظربازی

Still from Nazarbazi (نظربازی)
نظربازی
Nazarbazi
19' | 2021
with support from Film and Video Umbrella

Synopsis:

Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolutionary cinema, alluding to discreet forms of communication that operate within yet circumnavigate the censors. The montage attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch, inner feelings, untouchability beyond bodily experience, and the unwritten/unspoken prohibitions inside us. The film uses poetry and silence as the only languages with which we can touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.

نظربازی، که به انگلیسی به عنوان «بازی نگاه‌ها» ترجمه شده است، فیلمی درباره عشق و تمنا در سینمای ایران است، جایی که نمایش صمیمیت و لمس بین زنان و مردان ممنوع است.

این فیلم عمدتاً بر تصاویر زنانی تمرکز دارد که بدن‌هایشان در سینمای پس از انقلاب حذف و قربانی شده‌اند، و به اشکال مخفیانه‌ای از ارتباط اشاره دارد که درون محدودیت‌های سانسور عمل می‌کنند و در عین حال آن‌ها را دور می‌زنند. این فیلم تلاش می‌کند به فضاهایی بپردازد که نمی‌توانیم لمس کنیم: احساسات درونی، حس‌ها و لمس‌ناپذیری فراتر از تماس فیزیکی — ممنوعیت‌ها و مقررات ناگفته‌ای که ممکن است تنها به عنوان تجربیات بدنی آشکار شوند. فیلم از شعر و سکوت به عنوان تنها زبان‌هایی استفاده می‌کند که با آن‌ها می‌توانیم تلاش کنیم فضای مبهم اجتماعی-سیاسی را لمس کنیم.

Awards:

Jury statement at 70th MIFF:

Jacques Rivette once asked, “What is cinema but the play of the actor and the actress, of the hero and the décor, of the word and the face, of the hand and the object?” If this rhetorical question points to a deep truth about the nature of the medium, then Maryam Tafakory's poetic and quietly forceful found-footage collage is pure cinema. Taking the symbolically loaded exchanges between men and women in post-Revolutionary film as its starting point (physical contact onscreen is strictly forbidden by Iranian censors), Nazarbazi is a stirring reflection on desire, sensation, absence, control, freedom, and love.

Jury statement at 51st IFFR:

“An exceptionally skillful film, through the way it translates rigorous research into a convincing dramaturgical experience. The filmmaker managed to capture an argument into a piece of poetry - a seamless collage crafted with directorial intelligence and a seemingly effortless fluidity in both text and image. A film that seductively interrogates responses to censorship and suppression.”

Jury statement at 58th Chicago International Film Festival:

Maryam Tafakory's Nazarbazi re-presents a cinematic history as a method for examining the present. The film adeptly mines a wellspring of found footage media to demonstrate the tension between sound and silence, needs and wants, and the ability to fulfill them.

Screenings:

  • 1. MoMA Doc Fortnight [link]
  • 2. True/False Film Festival
  • 3. RIDM, Montréal
  • 4. TIFF [Wavelength], Toronto
  • 5. 70th MIFF, Melbourne
  • 6. 30th Curtas Vila do Conde IFF
  • 7. Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin
  • 8. Costa Rica International Film Festival, San José
  • 9. Frames of Representation, ICA London
  • 10. 39th Kasseler Dokfest

Reviews:

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