Filmmakers working under the constraints of an oppressive regime must become very good at leaving things unsaid. The main ideas are often relegated to the subtext, on the assumption (or at least the hope) that sensitive viewers will be able to read between the lines and, more importantly, that the censors won’t be able to. Of course, this doesn’t always work. As we have seen in the case of Iran, major filmmakers like Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof have proven unwilling to toe the line, resulting in high-level political actions against them. Nevertheless, Iranian film offers a unique test case for understanding to what extent a national cinema can “lie” its way toward the truth, somehow showing that which cannot be shown.
In a recent trio of short films, U.K.-based Iranian experimentalist Maryam Tafakory has been digging into the archive of both pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in order to brush it against the grain. Although there are many topics that Iranian cinema cannot ever address, queer sexuality is close to the top of the list, and Tafakory’s project in recent years has been to use clips from that large body of work to create an impossible cinema, one that poetically but unequivocally explores lesbian desire by collecting fragments and making them speak. 2023’s Mast-Del involves a story told by one woman to another while they lie in bed together. Razeh-del from 2024 is about two high school girls writing into a women’s newspaper. And in her latest film, Daria’s Night Flowers, Tafakory draws upon dozens of Persian-language films, both classics and obscurities, to weave a tale of jealousy, muted ambition, and creative suppression.
In its fragmented written narrartive, Daria’s Night Flowers tells the story of Daria, a writer who has just completed her first novel, about a mysterious girl named “Blue.” The female narrator describes falling in love with Blue. And in Tafakory’s story, Daria has a husband who is determined to destroy his wife’s writing. The novel tells of magical plants that can eat women “who were restless with illicit desire.” Later we learn that these plants are used to create strange drugs that rogue doctors use as a part of sexual conversion therapy. Throughout the film, Takafory combines interstitial scenes of domestic anxiety — dead leaves plucked off houseplants, trays of glasses being clanked about, a single dish being scrubbed — many of which are superimposed with shots of deep, still waters. The clips are splattered with bright dyes of blue and yellow.
The narrative Takafory elaborates is uncertain, often seeming more like a dream than a coherent fiction. In this sense, Daria’s Night Flowers wafts across the screen like a faint aroma, its subject matter incapable of being pinned down. This impossibility is a double-edged sword, since it threatens to leave no firm trace in history. (Officially, there are no lesbians in the Islamic Republic.) But it is also uncontainable, able to insinuate itself into spaces of consciousness it might otherwise never see. That which is never openly said cannot be censored. The unmade statement cannot be redacted.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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