Home (Stories)
Saturday, 4:00 pm, Regal Downtown #4
Ghazel is an Iranian-born contemporary performance, video, and installation artist currently residing in Paris. Home (Stories) is a film inspired by the performance “Home,” which she created in collaboration with a group of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants for the 37th Theatre Festival of the Venice Biennial in 2005. Ghazel returned to Venice and Mestre in October 2007 to find her performers and complete the film.
Interweaving various mediums, including masks, letters, phone conversations, stills, and drawings, Home (stories) illuminates individual cases of alienation and struggle as Ghazel’s subjects grapple with cultural differences between the East and the West, constantly questioning the meaning of “home.”
As an Iranian native working in Paris, Ghazel has confronted these issues on a personal level as well. Her previous films (such as the Me series beginning in 1997, several of which will be included on this program) have focused heavily on her own nomadic lifestyle and sense of cultural displacement. When asked about her work, Ghazel has said, “My films are like home movies and are filmed with a consumer model Hi-8 camera placed on a tripod. I film; I act, and I edit. I play with reality and fiction. This work is an obsessive work—and my life and films are one. All the paradoxes that make me: make my Me films; and my films are my parallel life.” In Home (Stories) Ghazel brings to life stories that she, and so many other displaced individuals, can relate to.
Following the screening, moderator Hamid Naficy will conduct a live Skype video chat with Ghazel in Paris. The arduous requirements required by the U.S. Embassy for an Iranian visitor’s visa application led Ghazel to decline, regretfully, our invitation to visit the Festival in person.
