LEFTBANK & LAB111 PRESENT FRAGILE TRACES: IRANIAN EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS

On June 26th, we are screening a series of Iranian experimental shorts by young independent filmmakers, where memory is not a return to the past but a trace still moving through the present — unfinished, carried in bodies, voices, labour, and images.

Made under conditions of war, political pressure, and social instability, these films treat lived experience as something fragmented: memory broken into moments within the present, found in domestic silence, the rhythm of work, bodily tension, the instability of sound and image. The traces they follow are at once personal and collective, political and everyday, moving between visibility and disappearance. This is experimental cinema as attention to what is still happening, not as documentation.

Assembled shortly before the recent war on Iran, the films now feel haunted by the possibility of their own disappearance — gestures interrupted mid-motion, images already damaged, lives lived under pressure. Cinema has always existed close to loss: yesterday it was nitrate stock and decay, today corrupted hard drives, broken transfers, and displacement. Drawing on Left Bank and underground traditions, these works approach cinema less as storytelling than as a fragile act of keeping traces alive.

The screening is followed by a Q&A.

This program is curated by Banafsheh Jokar and Ali Jamshidi in collaboration with the founder of Leftbank, Parham Sarkeshiki.