Film Studies Speaker Series: Zahra Khosroshahi (University of Glasgow) 'From Iran to Palestine: a cinema of solidarity and care'

Three years have passed since the murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of the Islamic Republic's brutal forces (September 2025). Exiled Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory, in a statement reflects on the cooption of woman, life, freedom, warning against a “liberal feminism that applauds when empire approves but stutters when Gaza burns.” Manijeh Moradian's insistence on a transnational feminist approach also addresses the cooption and even erasure of the roots of jin, jian, azadi urging that we move away from viewing “the movement in Iran in isolation,” offering in its place “a transnational feminist approach that takes into account the national and historical specificity of the uprising” (“Embodying Revolution”166).

Iranian women's cinema, I argue, serves as a crucial site for an intersectional feminism rooted in collective care and transregional solidarities. One that shows the urgency of seeking shared histories, of unravelling past and present colonial and imperial violences, and rejecting nationalism and dictatorship. In the exilic cinema of Gelareh Khoshgozaran and Sepideh Farsi we watch collective modes of storytelling, informed by formal filmic choices and narrative voices that propel a collaborative mode of filmmaking. In this talk, I turn to Khoshgozaran's The Retreat (2023) and Farsi's Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (2025) to show how cinema is not merely representational, but more crucially foregrounded as an experiential site — one that is transformative and radical.

Bio
Zahra Khosroshahi (she/her) is a lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is currently working on her forthcoming book entitled Iranian Women Filmmakers: A Cinema of Resistance (Edinburgh University Press). Zahra is a co-editor of the recently published Handbook of Iranian Cinema (IB Tauris 2004). She is also the co-director of the Creatives of Color Festival based in Glasgow.