Daria's Night Flower

A young woman vanishes; her first novel is to be buried in a garden because she writes about a forbidden love for another woman she simply calls “Blue”. There is faint hope that her words will someday breach the ground and grow into beautiful flowers. In her films, Maryam Tafakory weaves tight-knit aesthetic tapestries out of Iran’s vast film history. She uses scenes from 36 different Iranian films made between 1986 and 2010 – among them works by Dariush Mehrjui and Mohsen Makhmalbaf – to depict the invisible: the suffering of a young woman in love, the powerlessness and despair in the face of structural oppression by the regime in Tehran. Although now living in London, Tafakory builds artistic bridges to her homeland through cinematic collage and lyrical voice-over work that she performed herself.