Cinematic Homelands The Cultural and Gendered Imaginaries of Iranian Diasporic Women’s Filmmaking

This book maps an emerging cycle of films made by Iranian diasporic women filmmakers and produced outside of Iran, focusing on five significant examples: Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009), Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose (2014), Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance (2011), Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014). These films speak to the emergence of feminist concerns surrounding gender relations, female subjectivity and sexuality in diasporic filmmaking. The book intends to show how the body of recent Iranian diasporic women’s films demonstrates a substantial shift within the existing exilic and diasporic paradigm, requiring analysis of intersectional relations not only between ethnicity, culture and nationality, but also gender and sexuality. Attending closely to the vibrant feminist film culture generated by Iranian women in diaspora, this book aims to interrogate the diversity of women’s filmmaking practices and their role in shaping new representations of female subjectivity and the diasporic condition.

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The cinepoetry of Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men: Female histories and the cinematic space of the Garden.- Chapter 3. Transnational Iranian poetics of resistance: The Green Movement and Iranian women’s agency in Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose.- Chapter 4. The transnational cultural space of Iranian youth: Diasporic fantasy in Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance.- Chapter 5. Transgressing boundaries: The politics of resignification and Iranian diasporic imaginary in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.- Chapter 6. Beyond diaspora: The spaces in-between and the cinematic self in Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour.

Mara Antic is a Teaching Associate in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include feminist theory and women’s filmmaking with an emphasis on representations of gender, sexuality, and cross-cultural identity in contemporary transnational cinemas. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, The European Journal of Life Writing and MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.