ReFocus: The Films of Shirin Neshat

Maryam Ghorbankarimi is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on women’s representation in Iranian cinema, transnational feminist aesthetics, and the intersections of film, politics and cultural memory. She is the author of A Colourful Presence: The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema (2015) and editor of ReFocus: The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad (2021). She also co-edited The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Iranian Cinema (2024). Mazyar Mahan is a Teaching Associate and PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He teaches courses on transnational cinema, global art cinema, and understanding film. His dissertation examines films made by Iranian expatriate filmmakers over the past decade. His research has appeared in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, The Spectator, and The Palgrave Handbook of Arab Film and Media.

This impressive edited volume bridges the national and transnational to liberate Shirin Neshat from the limiting label of the ‘exiled postcolonial artist.’ Investigating her work’s multidimensional explorations of identity, each essay remarkably centers feminist agency in Neshat’s visual poetics and illuminates how her art transforms the personal into the collective and the image into a site of resistance and healing.

• 1. An overview of Neshat’s films and careerMazyar Mahan and Maryam Ghorbankarimi2. An Interview with Shirin NeshatMaryam Ghorbankarimi and Mazyar MahanPart I. Feminist Interventions and Cinematic Authorship3. The Emphatic Address of Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s Feature FilmsValentina Vitali4. Articulating the Feminist ‘I’: Shirin Neshat and the Politics of AuthorshipMazyar Mahan5. On the Orientalist Stage: Re-signifying Space and Silence in Zarin (2006)Farshad Zahedi6. Unveiling the Everyday: Female Subjectivity and Subversive Agency in Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009) and Mahdokht (2004)Farzaneh Ebrahimzadeh HolasuPart II. Diasporic Visions and Transnational Frames7. Displaying Iran: Shirin Neshat in the Global ExhibitionErin C. Devine8. Looking Beyond Oum Kulthum: Transnational Imaginaries and the Iconoclastic Vision of Shirin NeshatMichelle Langford9. Between Two Worlds: Transnational Feminism and Aesthetic Resistance in The FuryMaryam Ghorbankarimi10. Embodied Narratives: Shirin Neshat’s Use of the Body as Textual Ground in Dialogue with Wafaa BilalMaryam Takalou11. Migrant Dreams Build Nations; Shirin Neshat’s Reverent Gaze in Land of Dreams Endows Subjects with Human RightsMehraneh EbrahimiPART III. Sensory Histories and Poetic Bodies12. Cinematherapy: Shirin Neshat’s Delineation of Body, Sexuality, and Neurobiology of Trauma in Women Without MenDevaleena Das13. A Study of Music Temporality in Shirin Neshat’s short films the phenomenology of ‘Ma’(間), and the in-betweenness of sound and musicSascia Pellegrini14. Between Dreamscapes and Realities in Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams (2021) and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006)Maia Nichols15. Toward Transnational Desert Landscape in Shirin Neshat’s FilmsEbrahim Barzegar16. Reading Forough Farrokhzad through Fatimah al-Zahra: Self-Representation in Women of Allah (1993–1997)Reynier Valdés Piñeiro