Exploring the different registers through which images speak, or refuse to speak, to us, Tafakory's films attempt to dissect veiled acts of erasure – of bodies, intimacies and histories. Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. Working between cinema and live performance, she uses images, words and feelings to make textual and filmic collages that stitch together poetry, documentary and archival material. Her essayistic work observes the regulatory forces maintaining the cinematic codes in post-revolution Iranian cinema. She reorients our attention to what we can never see on the screen: the purposefully concealed, the buried, the ravaged, that which can expose the complicity of cinema with state violence.
