LEYLA, BAHMAN KHAN AND THE MAN WHO LIVES ON HEDAYAT STREET
لیلا٬ بهمن خان٬ و مردی که در خیابان هدایت زندگی میکند
2023 - IN PROGRES
Documentary - Fiction
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Since 2023, I have been researching marginal and fragmented historical events within Iranian contexts, exploring them through ghosts, ruins, and traces. I’ve uncovered these stories by visiting their places of origin, examining various documents, and gathering oral histories from locals. At this stage of my work, I am preparing to write the script for a short documentary film, which will juxtapose my personal ties to these stories with components from on-site interviews, oral histories, diaries, and archival footage.
Each story is fragmented and, for various reasons, has not been carefully preserved—whether due to patriarchal recollection, intentional decay, collective memory mechanisms, posing threat to the hegemony, or being exploited as propaganda. In these stories, different agents -humans or nonhumans- bear witness to the events, though many have been demolished, intentionally withered, hidden, or decayed for various reasons. In the final story, for example, the traces have almost entirely disappeared. I found references to this incident in retrospective newspaper readings from April 1975. The story centers on a man and a woman who, based on their rather unconventional beliefs, built a village with rules and structures. They built buildings from scratch and invited people to live with them. Ultimately, they devised a plan and they moved to a cave with their young children. The man left to execute his plan, but in his absence, the police discovered the cave and killed the woman.
The marginalization of this story means there is only a few documentation and photos. I traveled to the location in April 2024 aiming to locate the cave where they died. After interviewing locals, I learned that mining activities had destroyed the cave. So, I searched for the village itself. I found the school and the mosque that they had built, where the only existing image of them was located. Most locals referred to the husband as “Bahman Khan,” a term of honor. When asked about the woman, they quickly shifted to discuss her famous father. Her story had decayed, metaphorically like the cave destroyed by mining activities. Her narrative was corroded through layers of patriarchal recollection, losing clarity with each retelling.
Social structures influence what is remembered and what is forgotten. What endures in collective memory is not a simple sum of individual recollections; just as society is more than the sum of its individuals, collective memory transcends individual experience, shaped by shared narratives and cultural forces. A single fact can take on multiple forms with each retelling, evolving as it is remembered. This repetitive reshaping of memory allows the same event to be recalled in different ways over time.
Within this framework, memory operates like a garden with its own ecology—a space of compost, decay, and rot. Each story is interconnected with the others, forming an open-ended and unpredictable ecosystem, unlike a system with a single goal. Each narrative serves as a biotic element, their roots intertwined and casting shadows on each other.
As the evidence fades and the characters' stories lose their connection to the places they once inhabited, I am compelled to fill these narrative gaps with my imagination. This scenario finds a home in a space between history and story.
The script is a personal narrative on interconnection of the stories, their traces and and the way they are remembered/forgotten; A juxtaposition of poetic encounters with each story, interwoven with archival traces and interviews with locals from the place of origin regarding the events.
I began this project after discovering the documentary Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Iraniennes, Année Zéro by Claudine Mulard, filmed on March 8, 1979, during International Women's Day in Iran. The documentary remained undigitized until 2009*. My encounter with this fragmented beginning led me to trace a thread across various documents and non-documents; an urge to live in between the narrative gaps. Ultimately, I selected five stories from dozens, based on their interconnectedness and the traces they left on one another. The question of each source’s reliability prompted me to reflect on the relationship between story and history, as explored by philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Halbwachs, as well as feminist theories on filmmaking and transmateriality in the works of Karen Barad and Laura Mulvey. These ideas form the theoretical foundation of my script.
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- found archival footage
- recorded footage from the location of five fragmented historical events
-crafted footage to fill the narrative gaps with stories with fictive and folklore quality
*in progress