Maryam Tafakory's 'Razeh-del' at Locarno Film Festival

Maryam Tafakory's film 'Razeh-del' (secret heart) was selected for the Pardi di Domani 2024 International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival. The Iranian artist and filmmaker (born 1987) lives between Shiraz and London. Her practice combines textual and filmic collage, intersecting poetry, documentary, and archival material in Farsi and English. The film follows two female students in 1998 Iran who write to the first Iranian women's newspaper, awaiting publication while planning to make an impossible film. Tafakory's montage explores female bodies, gestures, and mutilated interstices in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, creating a feminist counter-archive that interrogates representation and the prohibition-desire binary under theocratic rule. The film uses an everyday object—an Iranian bag—as a means to touch without touching, navigating censorship and desire. Tafakory critiques extractivist capitalism and the fracture between social and sexual contracts, positioning the work as a radical political eroticism.