Niyaz Saghari

Daily observations and reflections of the second year of living in a pandemic. Our lives are limited to visits to the local Windmill Hill City Farm where animals and humans seem to live in harmony. I came across articles and videos about horseshoe crabs and their amazing survival through centuries and their impact on our survival. The farm shuts down and reopens as the vaccines roll out. The horseshoe crabs are on the verge of being added to the endangered species list. Like the old Farsi rhyme that Jonah tries to learn, we are in a circle tightly entangled.

Shot during the lock down in the spring of 2020, Missing Commas combines images of our daily family life confined to the small garden and the empty train station with the sounds from 50’s Sci-Fi film and songs from old nursery rhymes that resonate other pandemics in human history. A capsule of worries and concerns about humans and animal kingdom inferences, power of nature, an extinction looming closer and parenting in times when force of nature challenges the sense of safety you are supposed to create.

The filmmaker revisits the diaries she kept during the years when video was banned in Iran. Using her personal VHS archive of films as a point of reference, the film explores a very personal film history with audio interviews with film historians, film buffs and those involved in the film black market. This is the story of an underground subculture of cinephiles hiding amongst the first Iranian post-revolution generation, who pursued their love for cinema despite strict government restrictions and the threat of imprisonment.

Even in the last week of her life, my mother believed in the power of positive thinking. She told her nurse ‘+ x+=+’. I grieved for her by turning recordings of her voice , the sound of dust falling on her grave and old Super 8 family films into a piece that I watched over and over.

This films follows the emotionally intense experience of Saghari staying in her mother’s room, sleeping on her death bed, and trying to experience her point of view by going through her mundane objects. "Ghazal no 884" by Poet Bidel Dehlavi is read by a friend, sent as a voice message on Whatsapp as soothing company to calm the grieving moment. Mirza Abdul-Qader Bidel (Bidel Dehlavi) was born in 1644 in (Azim Abad) Penta, India. The themes of his poems are influenced by multitudes of philosophies including Hindu, Sufi and Islamic traditions. Following the ideas of Ebn al-ʿArabī, he considered air (an aspect of nafas-e Raḥmānī, the breath of the Compassionate) to be the foundation of the world and spirit. Everything else –minerals, plants, animals –are viewedas the product of nature, which itself emerged from a single word brought into being through the articulation of “the breath of the Compassionate”.

The poet Ali Sarandibi takes us to an experimental journey in to his work place in The Grand Hall of Books in Enghelab street in Tehran,best known for its bookshops and Tehran University.The sound bites from the shopkeepers tell the story of the arcade and how their work condition has changed lately.

A found-footage essay, Filmfarsi salvages low budget thrillers and melodramas suppressed following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Behind the hostel and bustle of shopping malls in Tajrish, a bazaar in north of Tehran, where the old meets the new, there is an old street where time seems to have stopped. Here is Koocheh Zoghali (Charcoal Alley) with its old school public bath, the second hand shops with all sorts of bric- a- brac and only one actual charcoal shop remaining from the old days. Above them all is a huge crane casting its shadow on the street like a giant about to devour the old narrow alley. In the sound interviews, one of the shop keepers predicts a future. He describes an image of chaos, protests and riots. Only few month passes and as I am editing the film, those imagined images come true in streets. The sound of real chaos from the streets in October 2019 sits right after the sound of prediction few months ago. When you shoot, you never know what might come true and what not.