Women and Documentary Film in Contemporary Iran: Reframing Reality

by Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi

Overview

This book locates a “gendered turn” in contemporary Iranian documentary that depicts itself in both the infrastructures of the practice and the aesthetics and subjects of the documentaries themselves. By merging three (inter)disciplinary areas of documentary film studies, women’s and gender studies, and Iranian studies, the book examines how women documentarians have engaged gender politics and sociocultural and technological changes since the late 1990s to produce a dynamic new range of documentary modes in regard to production, financing, distribution, and exhibition as well as forms and themes.

By mapping out the politics and aesthetics of women’s independent documentary film practices in contemporary Iran, this study delineates how women documentarians have incorporated the unique possibilities offered by the documentary medium to perform their agency, subjectivity, and creativity and how the medium of documentary itself has served as a much-needed document of, and advocate for, Iranian women’s issues.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399525701
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2025
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Old Dominion Universityin Virginia, USA.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Gendering the Documentary Film Industry in Iran: Sites of Production

2. Watching Iranian Women’s Documentaries: Sites of Distribution and Exhibition

3. Discovering the Self in Autobiographical Documentaries: Sites of Self-Reflection

4. Narrating Women’s Lives in Biographical Documentaries: Sites of Recognition

5. Advocating for Iranian Women through Documentaries: Sites of Negotiation

Coda

Bibliography

Index