Interview with Shirin Barghnavard
Visiting Professor at ENSAPC
This interview was conducted by sabrina soyer in January 2024
Shirin Barghnavard, you present yourself as a documentarist, but I see the way you create movies as art, an art of creating vivid images within the difficulty or the impossibility of going outside with your camera to do shoots, an art of telling within the unsaid, the unsayable and the repressed. How did you learn to do images the way you do? Did you study cinema or arts in a school, and did that provide you the tools you needed to be able to invent?
Shirin Barghnavard: Yes, I studied film at Soore University in Tehran and graduated in 2000, where I acquired the fundamental knowledge of filmmaking. I must acknowledge the significant influence of my teacher, Dr. Ahmad Alasti, who focused on introducing avant-garde and unconventional cinema during the three consecutive years I studied under him. At university, I began practicing the initial stages of filmmaking, creating experimental films with my ex-husband, M.Reza Jahanpanah, now an established cinematographer in Iran. We opted for experimental films initially due to their simplicity and lower budget requirements.
I appreciate your interpretation of my work and find it intriguing. The skills you describe were gained through the experience of working and living in an environment consciously recognized as a closed space subject to numerous restrictions and censorship—a space that not only fails to open up but becomes increasingly restrictive. In response, I sought “safe” and “secure” methods of documenting and storytelling that I knew would not receive government approval. Consequently, the process became self-taught.
In a broader context, I characterize this process as encompassing the entirety of individuals’ lives within totalitarian regimes. People, left with limited choices, adapt to challenging conditions while simultaneously striving to pursue their goals. They consistently devise new approaches to progress in various dimensions and mediums, a skill learned gradually through life under repression and censorship.
From October to December, you were invited to do a workshop with the students of ENSAPC, entitled, The art of Documentary Narrative. How did you work with the students? What were the methods, the advice and constraints you gave them to create images? Does pedagogy influence your own work?
S.B : I characterized this workshop as practical upon my application. As a filmmaker who does not come with a very strong academic background but immersed in practical experience, all my filmmaking training has been through hands-on workshops. The workshop aimed to instruct students in the filmmaking process, covering from brainstorming and idea development to screening the final product on a big screen, all through defining and actively working on a project.
To me, teaching filmmaking isn’t solely about imparting technical skills or academic knowledge. I approach it in a more life-oriented manner. Besides technicalities, I emphasize the significance of various aspects in the filmmaking process and aim to convey their importance to my students. One crucial aspect is recognizing filmmaking as a collaborative endeavor. Consequently, students should enhance their communication skills—engaging in conversations, dialogues, and seeking assistance from each other to bring their creative works to life. Filmmaking instills the values of collectivism. It teaches you to express yourself, to analyze, to critique, and to convince.
My class schedules follow an intensive and discipline-based approach. The workshop’s objective was to produce 5–10-minute creative documentary short films within 11 sessions, each lasting more than 4 hours. To streamline the filmmaking process, ensuring simplicity and speed, and importantly, to prompt students to employ creative storytelling methods, I structured the films in order to have either three shots (two cuts), one long shot (sequence plan), or solely archival footage (unrestricted shots). This framework compelled students to contemplate the structural aspects of their films. This mirrors my own filmmaking experience. I come from a place where I always faced restrictions. Restrictions, up to a certain point, stimulate creativity, but excessive constraints can impede progress.
In each session, I conducted a one-hour tutorial covering each stage—pre-production to post-production— specific to the class projects. The remaining three hours were allocated for project follow-up and guidance. I found the outcome of this workshop and the students’ responsiveness to be exceptional. A total of 8 short documentary films were created and showcased in the presence of numerous students and their guests at Centre d’art Ygrec-ENSAPC.
In the movie Profession: Documentarist, you worked with six other filmmakers: Sepideh Abtahi, Sahar Salahshoor, Nahid Rezaei, Farahnaz Sharifi, Mina Keshavarz and Firouzeh Khosrovani. Can you tell how you met and decided to gather to make this film? Does collaboration is something you seek for in your work? Are you often surrounded by other voices or people when you create?
S.B: Four of us had rented a space within a film production office, where we not only edited films for other filmmakers but also dedicated time to our individual projects. Following the severe repression by the Iranian regime after the 2009 elections and the heightened censorship and restrictions imposed by the government, we collectively experienced a prolonged period of depression and frustration. During that time, documentary filmmakers were a specific target of the Iranian system’s attacks, leading to the imprisonment of some of our colleagues.
In response, we decided to form a group of several female documentary filmmakers, pooling our resources to create a film collaboratively. This initiative emerged as an alternative in an environment where producing independent films alone had become significantly more challenging. Simultaneously, this filmmaking process served as a therapeutic journey for us. Over the course of more than 2 years, involving approximately 60 meeting sessions, we not only worked on the film but also shared homemade Persian dishes, drinks, dances, arguments, fights, laughter, and birthday celebrations.
Initially, we were a group of 10, but three members could not continue their involvement. The project was unique in that we didn’t seek a commission editor, producer, or any funding—it was entirely self-funded and executed according to our own timeline, without any specific deadlines. Working under these conditions proved to be challenging.
Certainly, I embrace collective work. Although challenging, I believe it fosters flexibility. In my filmmaking history, I’ve participated in several collective projects, co-directing ‘Scenes from a Divorce’ with M.Reza Jahanpanah and contributing to the semi-collective documentary series, ‘A Sense of Place’.
Furthermore, I consistently seek artistic advisors for most of my films. I find this practice strengthens my cinema by reducing absolute individualism. Filmmaking, by nature, is a collective and collaborative process. This is particularly evident in documentary filmmaking, where the cinematographer, editor, and all on-screen actual characters play pivotal roles in the creative process.
Feminist practices through filmmaking, art, poetry, music or agriculture, is a subject present in all your work, how did yourself discover feminism? Did you have figures around you that shaped your feminist consciousness?
S.B: I was raised and educated in Iran during a period when feminism held a limited and weak position in society. I believe that despite the considerable efforts of authors, thinkers, researchers, and activists in the field of feminism in Iran over the past years, it still has remained shrouded in ambiguity and constrained by numerous limitations, failing to flourish as it should. However, there is a rapid growth of feminism among the new generation in Iran, coinciding with an intensification of government repression. My upbringing took place within a patriarchal system and culture, where both men and women experience oppression. It’s a system in which young people, irrespective of gender, are victims, although the oppression of women has consistently been more pronounced. I discovered feminism myself. From the time I was a university student, I was gradually attracted to feminist readings, although at that time there was no such thing as the Internet. As a result, I was deprived of the circulation of free information and did not have access to informative sources and materials. But I am a woman. I saw and experienced all the oppression that was inflicted on women by the system and society. Gradually, I improved my knowledge in this field and was able to use my being a woman to enter the closed communities of women, especially in the more remote and deprived areas, record their conditions and tell their stories.
In earlier times, the complexities of technical aspects of cinema constrained filmmakers, and the industry was predominantly male-driven. Despite this, resilient women filmmakers, such as Forough Farrokhzad, Rakhshan Bani Etemad, and Mahvash Sheikholeslami, made significant contributions to Iranian cinema. I admired these female filmmakers from the start of my career and later collaborated with Rakhshan and Mahvash as their films’ editor. Today, there is a notable increase in successful female filmmakers, particularly in the realm of Iranian documentary cinema. The seven filmmakers of ‘Profession Documentarist’ exemplify independent and resilient women with feminist perspectives. During the making of our film, we encountered skepticism from male filmmakers who claimed it was impossible for seven women to collaborate on a film. However, we not only proved it possible but also established a strong and enduring friendship and solidarity among us until today.
Did the time you spent in France allow you to see possible bridges between feminist’s practices and struggles in France and in Iran?
S.B: Certainly, that was indeed the case. I want to highlight the strong bridge and connection that had already been established. For some years, the distribution of our collective film, “Profession Documentarist,” has been facilitated by the Feminist ‘Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir’. In 2021, as part of the project “FEMMES D’IRAN: DEVANT ET DERRIÈRE LA CAMÉRA,” conducted in collaboration with Sahar Salahshoor and the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, I participated in two panel discussions in Paris and Marseille. These discussions, featuring Nicole Fernández Ferrer, co-president of the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center, Sahar Salahshoor, Mina Keshavarz, and Mathieu Lericq, delved into detailed conversations about feminism.
During the last three months of my stay in Paris, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, responsible for artistic and cultural programming at the Cité internationale des arts, invited me to curate several open studios of the current artists of the Cité aligned with the exhibition, ‘Trailblazers, feminisms, camera in hand and archive over the shoulder,’ curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Nicole Fernández Ferrer. I themed the five open studios I curated as ‘The Art of Resistance.’ Additionally, in the five-day event ‘The Cinema of Resistance,’ organized by me and Guillaume Breton, responsable du Centre d’art Ygrec-ENSAPC, we conducted a detailed panel discussion after screening the ‘Profession Documentarist’. Me, Sahar Salahshoor and Nicole Fernández Ferrer, along with Guillaume Breton, participated in discussing the feminist approach used in creating the cinema of resistance. So, I can say that these bridges have not only strengthened but continue to expand.
In all your movies you mix media: archives, personal and historical, images from the present, photographs, found footage, you also use a lot of still images to tell stories in voice over… Watching “Invisible” or “Profession: Documentarist” I understood the hybridity of your films as a statement: to not document “the events” in the heart of the action, which is usually what is expected from documentary makers, right? But the heart of the action is where very often the violence takes place, and where most often women are not able or not allowed to go. So my question here is: what’s the relationship between image and violence in your work? I know it’s quite a long and hard question to answer here, but…
S.B: You have noticed a very interesting point. I had never thought of it!
I think we should first see what our definition of violence is. From my point of view, while violence has a very objective and external face, it also has a very hidden and internal face. Where there may not seem to be violence, I see violence. Wherever there is injustice, inequality, poverty, and oppression, an act of violence is taking place. I see this hidden violence in the daily lives of people in Iranian society and in other societies, including European societies, where racism, sexism, class differences and any other kind of inequality happen.
I have been exposed to both types of violence. On the one hand, the objective violence that I grew up with, because I spent my childhood to adolescence during the 8 years of very terrible Iran-Iraq war. I come from a country where every few days the news of execution, torture and imprisonment of people is published and the government shoots at protesting people in the street. On the other hand, I have witnessed the hidden cultural, customary, social and systematic violence against women and youth, as well as any forms of enlightenment and freedom of expression in Iran. As a result, I am very sensitive to violence, swiftly recognizing and acknowledging its presence in my surroundings.
My approach has never confined the structural format of my documentary films to a singular pattern. Initially, I select a subject that resonates with my concerns, allowing the subject itself to dictate the structural format in the subsequent steps. I maintain an openness to various possibilities in this regard. The incorporation of archival footage and photos in my films primarily serves as tools to amplify the impact of documentation. What fascinates me in this process is that these documentations originated from others and sometimes served different purposes. However, within my film, I personalize them, assigning alternative meanings. This aligns with a collective mindset, as if we are collectively contributing to a more potent narrative. In essence, hybridity assists me in shaping a collective form for my films, as if I am assembling a collective effort.
The last question I want to ask, cause we never ask enough how do artists make a living in France, it’s still a big taboo you know 🙂 Do you make a living as a filmmaker? Would you have advice for young artists or filmmakers to be able to sustain their work and be independent?
S.B: This is a significant challenge for independent filmmaking, often making it financially unsustainable. Generally, earning a living through independent filmmaking is impractical due to the limited market avenues available for such films. Consequently, I sought alternative means of living income. I ventured into editing other directors’ documentary films, started teaching alongside editing, and applied for various art residencies, scholarships, and fellowships. These opportunities assisted me in sustaining my commitment to art and filmmaking without compromising my financial stability. However, making a living through art remains a very difficult endeavor.
My advice to young filmmakers is to be honest with themselves, to avoid the competitive landscape, as it is boundless, to refrain from making movies solely for the sake of it and instead delve into their profound concerns, as this approach yields more impactful results. Another piece of advice is to save money gradually, investing in filmmaking equipment like cameras, audio tools, and editing software, paving the way toward independence. Lastly, I recommend finding like-minded individuals, forming filmmaking groups, and collaborating, fostering resilience on this challenging journey.
