Filmmaker Statement

I remember being a teenager in Tehran during the 2009 Green Revolution. The government reported that Ahmadinejad had won reelection, when in reality a majority of Iranians had voted against him. The image being crafted and presented wasn’t lining up with our reality and experience. With this film, I wanted to examine that formative experience in my life by really exploring the gulf between image and reality. But rather than setting the film in the middle of the protests or between angry men in a courtroom, I wanted to examine it through an oft-overlooked lens: the domestic feminine space. How does this image-obsession, this obfuscation, this confusion of signified and signifiers bleed into feminized domestic spaces? Through the microcosm of the feminine kitchen, I wanted to explore the parallel between the consequences of Najibeh’s iron fist and that of the fracturing dictatorship raging just beyond the gates of her home.