نظربازی
Nazarbazi
[19' | 2022]
Awards:
Best Experimental Short Film Award - 70th Melbourne International Film Festival, MIFF
Gold Hugo Award - Best Documentary Short - 58th Chicago International Film Festival
Ammodo Tiger Short Award - 51st International Film Festival Rotterdam, IFFR
Best Visual Concept Award - 12th Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, BIEFF
Best International Short Film Award - 29th l'Alternativa Cinema Independent de Barcelona
Best Short Film - 15th Archivio Aperto, Bologna
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:
True/False Film Festival
RIDM, Montréal
TIFF [Wavelength], Toronto
70th MIFF, Melbourne
30th Curtas Vila do Conde IFF
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin
Costa Rica International Film Festival, San José
Frames of Representation, ICA London
39th Kasseler Dokfest
Reviews
by Mike Hoolboom
Found Footage Magazine – print
by Mahan Moalemi
by Kevin B. Lee
by Namrata Joshi
by Elhum Shakerifar
words sketched onto the night’s taut skin
by Ben Nicholson
by Flavia Dima
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
Mentions
by James Prestridge: 50 Best Short Films Of 2022
by Dagmara Genda
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.
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The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolution cinema, and alludes to discreet forms of communication that operate within, yet also circumnavigate the censors. It attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch; inner feelings/sensations – but also untouchability beyond physical contact: unspoken prohibitions/regulators that may only unveil as embodied experiences. The film uses poetry and silence as the only language/s with which we can attempt to touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.
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Mentions
by Catherine Grant
by Ariel Avissar
by Leo Goldsmith
by Ben Nicholson
by Flavia Dima
By José Sarmiento Hinojosa
by Namrata Joshi
By Daniel Montesinos
By BERLINER