Director personal statement

A body, as an object and subject in a philosophical, phenomenological, anthropological and archeological perspective, provides the base for a cultural setting. It is in constant bilateral relationship with its surrounding environment. Body’s relationship with the past and history, which is the cause of its transformation, provides the grounds for a cultural, political and social interaction. Our bodies are meaningful political forms which are being transformed along their life span. In other words, our bodies typically step beyond their skin, flesh and bones and revive a cultural base inside and outside themselves under the influence of the surrounding world. Bodies can not only impact its surrounding world in terms of human events and incidents but are also impacted by them in the same form and manner. Through studying bodies, their historical, scientific and cultural memories can be attained; a body’s experience can be figured out. Human body can be a representation of a person’s experience, and their historical, political and cultural memory which influence the cultural structures and behaviors of a body’s living system. This leaves signs in a body that can be identified and studied through anthropological and archeological methods. The body that changes to a display scene for cultural, political and symbolic elements, the body that carries a historical language, the body that identifies a concept of geography, lines and borders, the body that reconstructs its sexuality, the body that maltreats and is maltreated, is constantly being transformed and reproduces its own identity. We are within our bodies yet far apart.  The cultural meaning of a human body is different in each geography considering the history of the land it belongs to with all its environment’s forms, architecture, past and contemporary surroundings which creates a different communication language.  

In each society, the feminine body is dependent on the social, urban, living and environmental restrictions and controls. In the geography of Iran, the body of a woman is considered as a taboo in the social, cultural and religious setting; and hence, studying and viewing feminine body is typically seen as a source of crisis. Visual language is another type of body’s relationship with its surrounding world. The body that stands at its farthest points of imagination comprehends its bodily image after looking at images or representations of the human figure. It imagines its figurative image in interwoven forms and completes the representation of its own body. We see our own eyes in others’ eyes. We understand our own bodies by observing and understanding others’ bodies. Cinema is the narrator of our organs and our organs are the narrators of stories.  Considering the social restrictions and the rigid presence of censorship and tendency to control women and feminine body in Iran setting, attending to subjects of feminine body in cinema faces abundant restrictions both in terms of form and meaning. 

Mania Akbari