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Axis 1 | Seeing Like/Against the State
ScreeningOctober 24, 2025 at 6:30–9:30pm
In-Person
La lumière collective
7080 Rue Alexandra #506, Montréal, QC H2S 3J5
Feminist Media Studio is delighted to announce the second edition of The Political Aesthetic screening series, unfolding from October 2025 to April 2026, curated by Farah Atoui and Sanaz Sohrabi.
Join us for the opening screening, Seeing Like/Against the State.
In the opening program of the second edition of the Political Aesthetics series we present four films from Iran and Syria that move between social documentary and essayistic modes of filmmaking. Together, these offer sharp criticisms of the industrial modernism promoted under Iran’s monarchy in Iran and the Baath party’s state-led visions of socialism in Syria. Focusing on infrastructures, the films reveal how postcolonial states imagine and stage themselves, via technology and ideas of progress, to shape collective memory, and exercise power. Kamran Shirdel, Omar Amiraly, and Mohamadreza Farzad turn different social infrastructures into an object of ethnographic inquiry: in their work, these appear as repositories of ideology, desire, and fantasy, as well sites where power is constituted, contested, and imagined otherwise. Importantly, their films attend to those who have labored in the shadow of such infrastructural projects: precarious laborers and marginalized political subjects whose lives and struggles are disappeared by official narratives and representations. The program highlights how the filmmakers interweave the social, the personal, and the industrial—seeing both like the state and against it—to open up new ways of reading the political through cinemas.
More Info
Program:
Tehran is the Capital of Iran, Kamran Shirdel, 1966, Iran, 18’
Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam, Omar Amiralay, 1970, Syria, 13’
A Flood in Baath Country, Oamr Amiralay, 2003, Syria, 45’
Blames and Flames, Mohammadreza Farzad, 2012, Iran, 27’
The screening will be followed by a discussion with anthropologist Cynthia Kreichati and film scholar Claire Begbie.
Film Synopses:
Tehran is the Capital of Iran, Kamran Shirdel, 1966, Iran, 18’
A text glorifying the Shah’s regime is set to ironic images of a poverty-stricken district in Tehran, populated by homeless people, blood sellers, and petit criminals. The film was banned for several years from public viewing. juxtaposes the real life of marginalized city residents with the positively intoned dictation of a professor reading in front of her students. The official ideology was called into question by opposing class lectures and scenes of vagrants, beggars, street vendors, manual workers and people selling their own blood. The film was banned and confiscated during editing, and in 1980 overhauled after being found in the archives of the Ministry of Arts and Culture (Docunight).
Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam, Omar Amiralay, 1970, Syria, 13’
The construction of a dam on the Euphrates River is an example of a country’s economic development. Through grandly composed images, rhythmic editing, and aestheticized details, the director demonstrates his admiration for the interwar avant-garde. The film is a celebration of the new, while at the same time showing a traditional way of life and calling attention to working conditions; it is a refrain-like evocation of an arid country that explores the difficult lot of Syria’s rural inhabitants (letterboxed)
A Flood in Baath Country, Oamr Amiralay, 2003, Syria, 45’
This film essay starts with a confession: director Omar Amiralay regrets his naive enthusiasm about the construction of the Tabqa Dam in the Euphrates valley—the subject of his 1970 documentary Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam. In that film, he praised the Syrian government for its modernizing drive, the consequences of which he didn't realize until a couple years later—the building of this dam radically changed the Syrian landscape. He then made Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974), showing how the inhabitants of a village along the Euphrates were affected by the dam and how the government abandoned them. With A Flood in Baath Country, Amiralay closes his trilogy on the Baath Party and its prestige project. Almost three decades later, he returns to the valley that is now home to Lake Assad. In the village of Al Mashi, he finds the perfect microcosm of the Baath Party regime, which promised socialism but instead introduced a strict autocracy in which old tribal structures were preserved.
Blames and Flames, Mohammadreza Farzad, 2012, Iran, 27’
Iran’s 1978 Islamic revolution was closely associated with movie screens, cameras, and television images. At its outset, there were the arson attacks on more than 130 movie theatres, and the revolutionary events themselves were spontaneously recorded on film by the participants. Using only period footage, the filmmakers meditate upon the role of cinema, television, and film in society (Docunight)
Seeing Like/Against the State is the first screening in the second season of the Political Aesthetic screening series, which takes place from October 2025 to April 2026.
Admission is free and no RSVP is needed. Please come on time to ensure access to seating.