In her second experimental documentary, anthropologist Roxanne Varzi travels back again to Tehran. This time, she decides that the best way to see a place with a multitude of preconceived notions attached to it is through the eyes of a child.
An ode to Abbas Kiarostami, who deftly showed us the world through the eyes of a child, Tehran Tourist is a project in guerrilla filmmaking. The film was shot predominantly on an iPhone, handheld and on the fly. It moves from the archeology museum in Tehran to a village in Kurdistan (soon-after devastated by an earthquake) to playgrounds and school rooms -- in and out of political --landscapes and allegory-- to elucidate an Iran that few are privy to.
The film plays with youthful notions of identity and place and belonging as a child tries to make sense of where he is and where he came from. All the while, it introduces the non-Iranian viewer to an Iran that very few are privy to.
A discussion featuring the filmmaker will follow the film screening
More about Roxanne Varzi
Roxanne Varzi is a writer, artist, filmmaker, playwright and Full professor of anthropology at the University of California Irvine.
She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, was the first Fulbright scholar to Iran since the Revolution, A Woodrow Wilson Scholar and the youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.
Her writing has been published in The London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Annals of Political and Social Science, Feminist Review, Public Culture, American Anthropologist. She is the author of Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran, Duke University Press, 2006 and the 2016 Independent Publishers Gold Medal winning novel Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran Stanford University Press. Her film, Plastic Flowers Never Die, 2009 is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and has been shown in Festivals all over the world. Her short stories have appeared in the New York Press and Anthropology and Humanism for which she won a first place short fiction award and in three anthologies of Iranian-American writing and are anthologized in four books of Iranian-American writing. Her multi-media sound and video projects, Whole World Blind, No Wings to Fly to God and Salton Sublime address war and climate change. Her first play Splinters of a Careless Alphabet about French philosopher Henry Corbin and the Iranian Revolution is being developed as a graphic novel and her second play, Yalda: an Iranian Twelfth Nightwas recently directed by Eli Simon in a reading at the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UCI.
