Lecture with film clips (English) and discussion (English & German)

»In my presentation I will engage in a ›conversation‹ with the 2023 documentary film Între revoluții (Between Revolutions), directed by Vlad Petri and written together with Lavinia Braniște. The film offers a poetic reflection on the in/visibility of female queer desire that I understand as a form of archival poetry invested not in linear conceptions of liberation but in the queer temporality of the in-between. I am especially interested in the juxtaposition of the fictional letters and the documentary form. The audience is presented rare historical documentary footage from the late 1970s to early 1990s from Romania and Iran while the women and their same-sex desire is never visually depicted. In many ways the narrated story and the images we are presented with do not align: we never see the women but from their longing letters we are to glean that they were lovers. The film evokes queer desires and a form of East-East political entanglement that is often overlooked in histories of the Iranian diaspora. The ordinary drama of the separated lovers plays out eventually as a temporality between revolutions that acquires yet another contemporary dimension against the backdrop of the Woman Life Freedom uprising (Zan Zendegi Azadi) in Iran.«