“I Thought You Hate War As You Called Me!”
While war destroys cities, it erases not only life, but also memory, culture, and the possibility to continue writing history. Simultaneously, in the shadow of the war of aggression by the USA and Israel, the state repression of the Islamic Republic in Iran intensifies – quieter, less visible, but all the more intense. What has been built up over years by civil society movements is today being pushed back, fragmented, and systematically extinguished.
This program shows films from the independent film collective Left Bank in Iran. The works were created under difficult conditions – before and during the escalation of violence and war. In moments of massacres and US-Israeli bombardments, the internet in Iran is not merely disrupted, but cut off as a strategic weapon to prevent bearing witness and to stifle the cry to the outside.
The filmmakers work in this vacuum – where communication is interrupted and artistic practice is life-threatening. The films reach us as fragments of a broken dialogue: urgent testimonies from a space that is violently cut off from the world and destroyed by the powers of war.
Aesthetics of Resistance: The Other Cinema
These films are created without a budget, often within a few days, with minimal means. Many of those involved are realizing a film for the first time and simultaneously take on all roles themselves: directing, camera, editing, sound. This practice is not a stylistic decision alone, but a form of survival – and of resistance.
As non-narrative cinema, these works refuse the dominance of the narrative. They do not search for linear meaning, but for intensity, a cinema that does not represent – it confronts.
Accompanied by an introduction by Dr. Maryam Palizban on the disappearance of safe spaces when war and repression attack culture and life simultaneously.
Left Bank is an active center dedicated to non-fiction cinema. Since 2018, it has officially pursued its activities in the field of non-fiction cinema with a focus on education, production, and filmmaking. Left Bank is a collective, self-governed, and non-affiliated cinematic entity that seeks—through the adoption of a council-based structure—to dismantle conventional modes of film production and vertical, hierarchical models of education.
To date, Left Bank has produced and screened dozens of films in the field of non-fiction cinema, with a particular emphasis on documentary and experimental practices. Its educational and production workshops recruit participants annually through open calls for multi-month programs and engage in the continuous production of films, whose creative processes extend uninterrupted until their public screening.
Among the core principles of Left Bank are the screening, retrieval, and rediscovery of marginalized and abandoned peaks of non-fiction cinema; a revolt against dominant and stabilized cinematic grammar; the elimination or reduction of delay as a defining condition of cinema; the revival of collective and reactive filmmaking; opposition to cinematic centralism; resistance to the hegemony of narrative cinema; the removal of hierarchies in both education and production; the redefinition of cinematic economics; and the creation of no-budget or low-budget works through lightweight tools and minimal means.
The event will be held in English.
