In September 2024, Iranian filmmaker Mina Keshavarz met with filmmaker and Akademie der Künste member Claudia von Alemann to talk about their artistic practices, backgrounds and the reactions they encountered when showing their work throughout their careers. Although almost half a century and very different geopolitical contexts separate them, the two women discover how similar their ways of thinking can be.

Claudia: We meet at the Akademie der Künste and talk about our films and ideas. I watched your films and was extremely impressed and moved because although I’m 40 years older than you, I’m working on the same subjects. I was fascinated by the theme of memory, by the way you go back to the place of your childhood, for example, in your film Phobos. What are you working on now, and what are your future projects?

Mina: First, let me say it’s an honour to be with you and talk about our films. I’ve discovered that we have a lot in common despite our different backgrounds and generations. Early in my career, capturing life around me was more important than the concept of memory. I was young, back then, my focous in my film is always women’s issues from a feminist point of view. But in recent years, as my country’s social and political context has changed so much, I’ve realised how important it is to keep our memories alive. And even more so when you live in a country under a dictatorial regime because that system wants to control your thoughts. With Phobos, I wanted to make a film about Iran – about the place I grew up. This town is called Bushehr, by the sea on the Persian Gulf. I was always afraid that this town would be destroyed and burnt down in the event of war.

The film Phobos is a way of visualising this nightmare and my childhood memories. Bushehr is not destroyed. It’s one of the most touristic cities in Iran. I worked in post-production to create these effects and stimulate the audience’s imagination.

Now, I’m continuing to make my film with archives. It’s not to share information or facts but to show audiences beyond these archives and tell the world what’s going on there.

What’s more, I want people to become aware of and remember the long way Iranian society has come to fight for a better future.

Claudia: You represent the town through your memories and imagination. It’s an incredible image that reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of Stralsund’s old harbour. But to return to this project, tell me more about the subject.

Mina: My new film is about my life in Iran over the last 24 years. It describes how I went from being a very active and optimistic young girl to a hopeless and disappointed person. It’s about all the changes, not only in my country but throughout the Middle East region.

Claudia: In The Art of Living in Danger, it’s also very moving that the women talk of hope or despair regarding all the laws that have changed. It reminded me a lot of my film The Next Century Will Be Ours. This phrase dates back to 1848, but almost two centuries have passed since then, and they haven’t been ours at all.

In the mid-19th century, women couldn’t be judges in court, nor could they study. They couldn’t even decide whether or not they could breastfeed their babies. All the laws concerned women in Iran or other countries like Afghanistan today. It’s incredibly tragic and sad but not hopeless. When the women in The Art of Living in Danger speak, I’m so emotionally involved with them. I see them from so far away and so close at the same time because we, much more privileged women in West Germany, started a women’s movement in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, we took to the streets and fought for free abortion for instance.

A group of women I was part of was demonstrating and breaking away from the socialist student movement to which I belonged. It was a large organisation that promoted left-wing ideas. But we wanted an autonomous women’s organisation. And then it just snowballed. It happened through mouth-to-mouth propaganda and through leaflets. We started with 10 people in January 1970, and two months later, there were 200 of us. We were very active and had a lot of fun. Male comrades looked down on us. They said, “Politically, you’re a secondary contradiction”. As Marx said, it exists the “Hauptwiderspruch und Nebenwiderspruch”.

But that’s not comparable to your situation in Iran and the incredible relapse of laws that existed but are now being withdrawn. And now, in Iran, this fight demands so much more courage, physical force and psychological force because it’s so easy to get arrested.

Mina: It’s interesting that you are talking about the 1960s and 70s and the women’s movement in Germany. In Iran, the women’s movement also has a very long history. It’s been around for over 100 years. For example, women in Iran were granted the right to vote in the 1940s. It happened earlier than in many European countries.

Before the revolution, the situation of women was by no means perfect but acceptable. After the revoloution, women continued tob e visible and active in the society, to resist and fight to keep their place. I’d really like to work on a project about the history of the women’s movement in Iran after the revolution. There was a big women’s movement in Iran in 2006. It was the “1,000,000 signatures” campaign.

That’s how many women took part in the campaign. It was a vast network throughout the country, even in small villages. At the time, I wasn’t living in Tehran, but I took part in this campaign by spreading the word, going to see family and relatives and talking about all the rights and everything that needed to be signed. It’s not something very sexy for the Western media because then they say, “Oh, Iranian women are like us”. They fight for their rights. They’re very progressive. They’re educated. For me, as a filmmaker, it’s always been a struggle to show that, even though we have this Islamic regime, it doesn’t mean we’re passive or accept this discrimination.

Some of my friends, also active in women’s rights in Iran, have asked me why I don’t make a film about violence against women in Iran. But I never wanted to talk about violence just by showing violent situations. I don’t want to victimise the people. When I heard about the launch of this campaign, I thought this was exactly what I wanted to talk about: the alternative to domestic violence, showing how women take action and how they break the silence and share their stories and testimonies. Then I remembered my grandmother’s story. I said to myself that I couldn’t talk about domestic violence without mentioning my grandmother Nurijan’s story.

Claudia: That really touched me, as you said that this had always been a secret in your family, and it remains a mystery in the film until you mention the tea in which she put the opium. She drank the cup of tea, went into the garden and died. How many children did she have?

Mina: Eight. She was 35.

Claudia: It’s good that it’s kept as a mystery in your film. This leads us to the next subject, which connects the two of us. You always combine poetic, experimental language with a documentary perspective. You often use shaded or diffused, obscured images and film people talking about their emotions and political problems. In the 1970s, the general view was that filmmakers should adopt only one of these positions (experimental or documentary), not both. That’s what I did, too; I used both poetic and factual language. And at the time, it wasn’t very well accepted.

Mina: I think it’s still not well accepted!

Claudia: It’s more accepted, but it’s not yet how it should be. That’s why I really like this hidden story inside the story. It’s so obscure, and it remains obscure. And you don’t give a clue. Especially at a time when everyone’s talking about themselves in an indiscreet way, these hidden, obscure cinematic questions are quite wonderful.

Mina: Thank you. I really like the poetic language in your films. I am primarily inspired by literature and poetry. And the other thing in that documentary is the issue of distinguishing between reality and fiction. No film is an authentic reality because we use the camera to edit and create the scenes. But I think it’s essential to have this imagination in real life and bring it to documentary form – for example, in The Art of Living in Danger, when I follow these women in contemporary Iranian society. They struggle, and I shoot these scenes with my camera in a very direct way. But I want to go beyond this reality. In my previous film, Braving the Waves, I also filmed in a direct way, but I showed the character’s imagination through painting. So the viewer gets to know the character in a more intimate way. Also, sometimes, reality is too tragic to be tolerated. And I think the imagination is a refuge we use to be able to survive.

Claudia: That’s very courageous to go back through 26 years of your life. When I was 18, I went to a catholic grammar school for girls in Cologne. At the time, we were impressed by the Cologne music, dance and theatre scene, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham and the famous studio für elektronische musik and composers such as Stockhausen, Ligeti, Koenig and Kagel. At 18, I was quite fascinated by this music called “Neue Musik”. We were a group of young people engaged in avant-garde theatre, music and also inspired by the Fluxus movement. We worked on the basis of improvisation, with little money, and gave performances in small theatres.

Recently a friend with whom I went to school and I wanted to make a film together about the time when we were 18. We wanted to return to our roots, to what made us who we are. We won a grant from the Akademie der Künste to develop the project and were able to work a lot with archives. We wanted to create an experimental filmic collage, a mixture of archival materials, photos, film footage and music. We wanted to go back to our artistic roots and this independent thinking from the new avant-garde movements, which fascinated us. But we did not yet find a budget to produce it independently by ourselves.

Anyhow, I think it’s incredibly courageous to return to your Iranian youth. How do you plan to finance it?

Mina: I don’t know. I am still struggling with this! The film is based on an archive; therefore, a lot of costs will be incurred. For my previous projects, I applied for cinema funding or made direct pitches through industry channels and forums. But for this film, I decided not to, because it is a very personal one. I didn’t want to face stupid questions, like why do I want to talk about the situation in Iran if I am not a politician or a sociologist and have no legitimate authority to analyse the whole situation in my home country. I tell a story about a girl who grew up and worked there and how she transformed over the years because of the social-political situation that affected her life, which is my life.

Since you mentioned the avant-garde movement, I am also very inspired by the avant-garde movement in foreign countries. When I was in high school, Internet access was still very new. I had a blog. I wrote about cinema and documentary themes, mostly avant-garde cinema in other countries. I watched Maya Deren’s films and listened to John Cage’s music and different videos by international avant-garde filmmakers. And this language still moves me, whether it’s used in music or literature.

Claudia: What did you study?

Mina: I studied industrial engineering. I studied physics and mathematics in high school. I really wanted to study film and cinema, but my family was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make enough money for my future. My parents both said that as a woman, you must have your own income and that studying engineering is better. So did I, but during my studies, I continued to read and write essays and articles about cinema and avant-garde themes in Farsi for different magazines and newspapers. When I finished university at 22, I started to make films. I never earned money from engineering but rather from cinema. Sometimes, I think it was perhaps fortunate not to have studied cinema. Sometimes, you go to university and lose your passion. It happened to other people. Later, I tried to go abroad to study for a Master’s in cinema, but financially, it was too difficult for me to travel. Then, I started to make films directly. So maybe, later, I’ll study for a PhD in practice if I find a good place and if they accept me. Anyway, my nature has always been to study by myself.

Claudia: I went to a university in West Berlin to study sociology and art history. I studied here in West Berlin and worked as a ticket controller at the Schiller Theater. But I left after three semesters because I absolutely wanted to study film directing, but there was no film school yet. At the time, the Berlin Film Academy DFFB (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin) was still looking for a director. Peter Weiss, whose early novels had influenced me very much, refused. So I applied to the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (hfg ulm.) This school was considered the successor to the Bauhaus.

Exceptionally there were 4 women who studied filmdirecting among 20 students altogether, as Ula Stöckl and Jeanine Meerapfel, who came from Buenos Aires. We had theoretical and practical classes from 9 to 6. We had to learn sound, editing, camera and directing. It was sometimes hard to spend four years in this very small, traditional town. At that time, boys with long hair and girls with miniskirts were frowned upon.

But it was an excellent cinematographic education. We were impressed and liked Edgar Reitz’s and Alexander Kluge’s films, who were our teachers, but we could also criticise them.

Getting back to your style, one sentence impresses me very much, which I learned by the late us-american film director Leo Hurwitz, whom I loved very much and knew personally.

He once made a four-hour film called Dialogue with a Woman Departed, in which he talks to his dead wife. She was his collaborator and co-director. He speaks his commentary in his own voice, addressing Peggy, who is absent and tells her the story of their fights as part of civil rights movements. He mixed this material with very poetic moments, by filming a tree for long minutes, with snow falling, while addressing his absent wife. This was very unusual at the time, and he earned a lot of criticism, when the film was shown by the Internationales Forum des Jungen Films in 1983. (Berlinale). Spectators got furious because they were expecting only political points of view and images of demonstrations and fights against the police and no trees, landscapes and a poetic language. I was furious about the aggressive reaction of the public. I did not say anything because I was too shy to speak up in public, but I thought that’s exactly what I want to do.

Later, when he was interviewed in a Tv film, Leo Hurwitz said, “The best thing we put in our films comes from our subconsciousness”. This became a key sentence for my films, in Nuits Claires (Bright Nights), for example. And this is what I see in your films, too.

It’s about the underlying obscure structure, like a rhizome or weeds in the water that you haven’t seen but are moving underwater. The photographic image is also important. It’s not just the political statements and language that come out of the interviewee’s mouth.

Mina: I completely agree. I’m interested in political themes, but I don’t like to make a political statement. I think it’s our task as artists to look beyond the situations happening around us. If you show a very political demonstration or movement in a film, it’s very important how we show it, how we talk about it, how we can imagine it and how life goes on around it. It’s not just about this political event; it’s also about the daily life around it.

In Iran, there are lots of protests and tragic moments, but at the same time, we get on with our lives. We go shopping, we cook, we meet our friends, we talk, and we go to the cinema. And these protests happen around us. I really like this approach, especially looking at it from a different point of view. For my film Braving the Waves, I received criticism from people in Iran or filmmakers that the poetic language doesn’t match the film. But it was my decision, and I really wanted to show a reality beyond that woman’s situation: her thoughts and what I couldn’t capture with the camera alone.

I remember that also for The Art of Living in Danger, some filmmakers, mostly in Iran, said that my grandmother’s story shouldn’t be part of the film. But yes, for me, it is, and my grandmother’s story is the reason why I am a feminist and have been actively fighting for women’s rights for many years. I never met my grandmother. My mom was 10 years old when her mom killed herself. For my film, I wanted to have this fictive dialogue with my grandmother and talk about the current situation in our country, even if my editor tried to discourage me back then.

The style of working with shadowed and out-of-focused images is very interesting to me because many things are unclear in reality, too. I think that this style helps activate the audience’s imagination and create a connection with a person or a situation.

Claudia: It reminds me of a story of mine when I made this film about my mother, confessing that she had believed in nationalsocialist ideology and saying that she regrets it and feels guilty about it. My mother was not an intellectual. She raised six children and was a housewife. I wanted her to tell me, her daughter and also her granddaughter who was 17 at the shooting, why she believed in this cruel and brutal ideology. I wanted to know. And I believe in her regrets and her guilt about this belief. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have made a film about her. It is important to me to address “ to ordinary people”. It is essential to know what these people go through and what strange and sometimes erroness and contradictory paths they take.

Mina: The majority of our society consists of ordinary people. It is very important to talk about people who do not have access to a platform – a place where they can talk or share their thoughts. This does not mean I can give them that, but it is the reason why I adapted my cinematic approach to my personal experiences. I thought that I could resolve many things within myself through my filmmaking. This meant turning the camera on myself and dealing with my challenges and obstacles as a woman in Iran. The film shows women from a middle-class family growing up in a small town outside the centre. However, personal topics are not welcome in Iran. A film about my divorce was taboo in Tehran, even for my colleagues. They asked why they should watch the story of a middle-class woman who is simply upset about her marriage and her husband, even though the husband was a nice man. But I wanted to show that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone to get divorced. As a woman, you can make this decision yourself. When I made this film (Soora – Breaking the Silence, 2018), I was 26 years old, and it was my second film. Everyone said, “Oh, she’s a feminist.”

Claudia: How evil! (laugh)

Mina: But I did it, and this film helped me a lot in my personal life. Because I was finally able to tell my parents that I was not happy and that I wanted a divorce for the first time in front of the camera. It was my choice. The film was first banned in Iran because the Ministry of Culture had problems with me “divorcing without reason”. I was questioning myself and felt guilty. Six years passed, and about 30 universities in Iran screened this film. Society changed, and the same people who blamed me at the time, like the film now. Because society has changed. For me, this film is a scale that measures this change.

Claudia: In conclusion, I would like to quote François Truffaut. “If you want to send a message, go to the post office,” he said in an interview to someone who asked him about his political involvement. We can say the same thing about our films.

Image: Mina Keshavarz „The Art of Living in Danger“, 87 min, 2020