Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p

Feb 19, 2025 at 7:00 pm
Rebel Flesh
With Yasaman Baghban, Nazanin Noroozi & Homa Sarabi
UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY
We’re delighted to come together with ArteEast to co-present REBEL FLESH, curated by Homa Sarabi! REBEL FLESH presents films that examine the impact of revolutionary upheavals on families and the relationships that are shaped—and often shattered—by the brutal demands of ideological regimes. We’ll be screening three powerful films — Impasse, by Rahmaneh Rabani and Bahman Kiarostami, A Feast in a Mirror, by Yasaman Baghban and This Bitter Earth, by Nazanin Noroozi!
These works reveal the impossibility of selfhood within systems that demand absolute obedience, highlighting how defining oneself becomes an act of revolt. In this context, the simplest acts of self-expression become revolutionary. These films capture the fleeting moments of freedom where individuals assert their identities, fight for their memories, and strive to memorialize themselves in ways that reflect their true selves, not the versions dictated by authoritarian forces.
The program also considers the paradoxical relationship between religious authority and bodily control. It explores how regimes that define themselves through the regulation of bodies inadvertently provoke resistance through the very expressions they seek to suppress. Through intimate stories and diverse cinematic expressions, these films offer a powerful exploration of sovereignty, rebellion, and the enduring struggle to reclaim one’s body as a site of personal and political autonomy.
We’re thrilled to have Yasaman and Nazanin in conversation with Homa after the screening. Come through!
Note: This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. The full program – with more incredible works by Maaman Rezai, Elahe Esmaeili and Jocelyne Saab – will be screened online on artearchive.org from February 2025.
Program
Impasse by Rahmaneh Rabani & Bahman Kiarostami
89 mins, 2024, Iran, Persian with English subtitles
Rahmaneh Rabani is a 37-year-old Iranian woman, born and raised in an observant Muslim household. After the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iranian authorities in the autumn of 2022, mass protests ignited one of the largest women’s rights movements in recent Iranian history. With the protests raging outside of her window, Rabani picks up her camera to document honest, direct, often emotional conversations with her family members as she attempts to understand the women and men around her who remain steadfastly opposed to equal rights for women. An energizing, courageous act of art as direct action, Rabani and Bahman Kiarostami’s Impasse turns into a microcosm of Iranian society as the walls of patriarchy and deep cultural and religious pressures spark a generation of women who demand basic human rights. But will Rabani’s struggle to maintain the family bond across three generations crack under the pressure of politics?
A Feast in a Mirror by Yasaman Baghban
18 mins, 2023, Iran
A Feast in a Mirror is a film about the eternal feeling of otherness experienced by women, whether they are citizens or foreigners in any country, be it East or West. Years of oppression and the denial of basic rights in Iran have elicited rage and shame but, paradoxically, have also given rise to courage and power. Thus, as an Iranian woman, my character becomes a dichotomy. Although I often shouted silently as a woman by breaking the rules and taboos, I never gave up. Like many of my friends, I crossed borders to pursue independence. We are all aware that the wounds inflicted on this path will never fully heal.
As I grew older, I realized that the feeling of incarceration grew with me. Imagine a fidgeting woman in a cell, constantly asking herself, “Why don’t I deserve genuine freedom?” And the moment she feels freedom, other inhumane rules in a Western country put her in shackles. Is it fate that my body is not my own choice?
In the journey from East to West, from imprisonment to freedom and back to imprisonment, memories have always acted as a double-edged sword. Not only memories but also dreams and myths continually transport me between parallel universes. This experimental documentary film portrays my perception of those universes while my body floats in different spaces.
This film explores the concept of heterotopia, focusing on women’s bodies, and captures the feeling of imprisonment experienced through immigration as well as the protests against unfair laws. Whether in countries like the US or Iran, where dictators subvert the meaning of humanity, it examines the struggle for justice.
This Bitter Earth by Nazanin Noroozi
5 mins, 2023, USA
This Bitter Earth is an experimental stop-motion film centered around found footage and archival images from viral news stories juxtaposed with hand painted Super 8 family movie frames. The film encompasses four main image series reconsidered and revisited in multiple: the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by the Iranian government; the devastating explosion at the Port of Beirut, Lebanon in 2020; the last U.S. airplane leaving Afghanistan in 2021 after the military’s withdrawal; and home footage of a childhood birthday party in Iran. Imagery from Super 8 home videos serves as a foil to the political permutations of instability and insecurity. Punctuating the historical horrors around them, the birthday party Noroozi depicts in print and paper pulp becomes tinged with tension, as though the celebrants are anticipating a disruption to their joy. By blurring and distorting the home videos and news footage alike, Noroozi removes the individuality of her subjects to allow viewers to insert themselves and their own stories into the found images. She universalizes otherwise personal feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and despondence: a sense of sadness at the loss of life, despair at betrayal of principle, and the helplessness of losing control of one’s destiny ripple out globally. (Text by Eliana Blechman)
Program Duration: 112 mins

Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios

Yasaman Baghban: As a woman living in a developing country, I found colonialism and imperialism to be extremely challenging. As a result, I chose post-colonialism as the theoretical framework for my master’s thesis, in which I evaluated Chris Marker’s documentaries. This prompted me to conduct further research on essay-film. Upon completing my graduate studies in Iran, I felt compelled to share what I had learned, so I began working as a lecturer. Given my strong interest in the relationship between media and cinema, I taught courses on multimedia, photography, and directing. After two years of teaching at the Art of Shiraz Institute of Higher Education, I applied to the MFA EDA program at Duke University, which was highly competitive. I was thrilled to be accepted, as I saw it as an opportunity to improve my knowledge of documentary filmmaking and gain more diverse living experiences. My immigration experience inspired me to focus on epistolary, exile, and feminism in my thesis film. I can now proudly identify myself as a documentary filmmaker.

Nazanin Noroozi is a multi-disciplinary artist working with moving images, printmaking, and alternative photography processes to grapple with personal archive, collective history, and displacement. Noroozi’s work has been widely exhibited at galleries and museums across the world including Baxter Camera Club NYC; SPACES, Cleveland, OH; NY Live Arts; Athopos, Athens, Greece; Immigrant Artist Biennial; Noyes Museum of Art, NJ; School of Visual Arts Chelsea Gallery; and Golestani Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany. Her works are in public collections such as New York Public Library, Harvard Art Museum, Arizona State University, and Alfred University. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts in Film and Video, Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Print/Paper Fellowship at Dieu Donné, Artistic Freedom Initiative, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Mass MoCA residency. Her works have been featured in various publications and media including, British Journal of Photography, Die Zeit Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Elephant Magazine, and Financial Times. She is the editor-at-large of Meta-Text, Kaarnama Journal of Art History and Criticism’s artist projects. Noroozi moved to the New York City in 2012 and received her MFA in 2015 from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She lives and works in the city.

Through moving image, non-fiction storytelling, media arts, performance, and community-engaged practices Homa Sarabi explores the different dimensions and effects of physical and emotional distance and connection, history, and personal and collective memory. She collaborates with RPM Film Festival as a programmer and serves as the short program director for Salem Film Fest. Homa teaches 16mm filmmaking and collaborative design studios at Emerson College, where she is a faculty fellow with the Engagement Lab.
From the Event
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