Cherry Blossoms at Night
Part of the Image Before the Fire Collection

This evening brings together a selection of films curated by Left Bank Collective, an autonomous filmmaking initiative based in Tehran that operates outside institutional and hierarchical frameworks. Since its founding in 2018, the collective has approached cinema as a shared practice, where making, learning, and exhibiting are inseparable from one another.

Emerging from the margins and sustained through collective processes, the films in this program move fluidly between documentary and experimental forms. They resist fixed cinematic languages, unsettle narrative authority, and open up space for alternative modes of seeing and thinking. What emerges is not a unified style but a constellation of gestures, where images carry both poetic charge and political urgency.

Bringing together works by filmmakers from Iran’s independent scene, the program reflects on conditions of visibility, control, and erasure, while insisting on cinema as a space of persistence. These films do not simply represent reality but engage with it, interrupt it, and reconfigure it through fragmented structures, indirect approaches, and acts of formal disobedience.

Screening Program:

Epilogue in Prologue (Zahra Qodsi, 2025, 14’)
Hegemony (Maryam Mortazavi, 2023, 7’)
A Mountain Away (Musa Ibrahimi, 2025, 15’)
Lady in Red (Maedeh Mohsenpour, 2024, 6’)
Listen, do you hear the wind of darkness (Maryam Mortazavi, 2024, 6’)
It was snowing in that burnt (Fatemeh Akbari Mehr, 2025, 33’)
Ghorab Jendoon (Fatemeh Akbari Mehr, 2024, 5’)

Total duration: 86 minutes

Left Bank Collective

Left Bank is an active center dedicated to non-fiction cinema. Since 2018, it has officially pursued its activities in the field of non-fiction cinema with a focus on education, production, and filmmaking. Left Bank is a collective, self-governed, and non-affiliated cinematic entity that seeks—through the adoption of a council-based structure—to dismantle conventional modes of film production and vertical, hierarchical models of education.

To date, Left Bank has produced and screened dozens of films in the field of non-fiction cinema, with a particular emphasis on documentary and experimental practices. Its educational and production workshops recruit participants annually through open calls for multi-month programs and engage in the continuous production of films, whose creative processes extend uninterrupted until their public screening.

Among the core principles of Left Bank are the screening, retrieval, and rediscovery of marginalized and abandoned peaks of non-fiction cinema; a revolt against dominant and stabilized cinematic grammar; the elimination or reduction of delay as a defining condition of cinema; the revival of collective and reactive filmmaking; opposition to cinematic centralism; resistance to the hegemony of narrative cinema; the removal of hierarchies in both education and production; the redefinition of cinematic economics; and the creation of no-budget or low-budget works through lightweight tools and minimal means.