Transnational Iranian poetics of resistance: the Green Movement and Iranian women’s agency in Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose (2014)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mobilizing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-revolutionary,” this article aims to address the relative absence of film studies scholarship on Iranian diasporic women’s cinema and transnational Iranian poetics of resistance. More specifically, it examines the role of female agency during Iran’s 2009 Green Movement in Sepideh Farsi’s, arguing that Farsi’s portrayal of a young Iranian woman’s progressive politics and sexual emancipation foregrounds connections between Iranian national and diasporic politics and poetics of female resistance. Formally, the film interweaves videos of the Green Movement made by anonymous protesters with intimate fictional narrative, allowing the two modes of storytelling to coalesce in their use of politicized bodies resisting the hegemonic ideological discourses of the state. I argue that the film’s textual hybridity emphasizes the role of “raw” protesters’ footage as an example of “minor” video, in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense, in an effort to encompass and preserve the fragmented yet assertive voices of the Iranian civil rights movement and struggle for democracy.