Freeform Group Exhibition; Featured Ali Katmiri, Yassaman Emami, Emad Katmiri

In Persian there is a saying, خون گریه کردن, to cry blood. It is an Iranian expression for grief so total that it exceeds what tears can carry. In this film, she cries blood until it drowns her. This follows the postmodern suspicion of metanarratives, the grand stories that claim to explain everything. Deconstruction takes the large accounts apart, and what is left is the local and the lived. So its makers did not tell the story of a war. They told a story they know: the unanswered call, the ringing, the silence afterward, and the mind rushing to fill that silence with everything it fears. Distance does not protect you. It leaves you helpless in a way that being there does not. Ali Katmiri, Yassaman Emami, and Emad Katmiri made it together, at different distances from the war. Emad Katmiri lived through it directly in Iran, and composed the music and edited the work from inside it. Ali Katmiri was in London throughout, and wrote and directed it from outside. Yassaman Emami spent half of the war in Iran and half in London, and drew and painted every frame. Ordinary life does not pause for catastrophe. She is doing her makeup when the news arrives. That is how it happens: mid-gesture, mid-morning, mid-nothing.