Concept: Ute Holl, Matthias Wittmann, Hemen Heidari

Contributors: Mazyar Eslami (Teheran), Christine Lang (Potsdam), Adineh Khojastehpour (Wuppertal), Seyedkeyvan Mirmohammadi (Köln), Bert Rebhandl (Berlin), Niklaus Reichle (St. Gallen), Golbarg Rekabtalaei (South Orange NJ), Sahar Salahshoori (Paris), Farshad Zahedi (Madrid)

Although censorship seems to render realism in film completely impossible, the history of Iranian cinema can be regarded as a history of attempts to put into effect a specific kind of realism. The assumption of the workshop is, that Iranian cinema never strives to represent reality but to produce it in a strategic and tactical manner. Realism remains a question of form, politics and effect.

It is a leitmotif of Iranian Sufism that truth would be a perfectly polished mirror where the light is given shape (Corbin), but this mirror has been broken into pieces. Images of mirrors are a recurring motif in Iranian cinema. In many cases, they are shattered. The notion of the broken mirror opens up several possible perspectives on the relation between image and reality. Be it, that the way of searching the truth is more important than finding it, be it, that the reality of the image is defined by a deficit, always referring to a multiplicity of other possible realities (= mirror fragments), be it, that the measurement of universal truth is lost and artists are committed to a particular shape of the mirror fragment.

A lot of Iranian films are compared to Italian neo-realism and symbolic or magic realism. The starting point of the workshop will be the assumption that those links and parallels don’t do justice to the complexity of Iranian forms of realism. Therefore, we are interested in carving out differentiations: What forms and concepts of realism can be found in the history of Iranian cinema? Is there any possibility to draw a line between fictional and documentary impulses? What ontological and social status, what reality of relations do moving images have in Iran’s visual culture, also in relation to an economy of political power? What tactics have been developed in order to produce documentarising viewing modes (Odin) and effets de réel (Barthes)? What layering of acting modes, what interleaving of pretending to pretend (to pretend) might lead to certain effects and dimensions of social reality? What can be said about the cooperation of image and sound-design regarding things that can’t be said or shown? How can the forms with which Iranian movies work on 'our' imagination of reality be brought into dialogue with specific philosophical traditions?