Irani Bag is a split-screen video which examines the apparently innocent deployment of the humble handbag in Iranian cinema. Using excerpts from 24 films made between 1990 and 2018, director Maryam Tafakory elucidates a codified vocabulary in which objects are used as surrogates to “mention the unmentionable” and “touch the untouchable”—in what she terms post-revolutionary Iranian film’s “handbag technique”.
Irani Bag is part of Monographs, a new series of essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive (AFA).
