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An ethnographic study of how Iranian documentary filmmakers navigate censorship and creativity to shape civic discourse.

Iranian filmmakers have overcome significant obstacles to create a distinctive, globally renowned cinema. Filmmaker and educator Persheng Vaziri explores how documentarians, in particular, have developed a dynamic and creative environment by negotiating limited resources and official constraints. Through their films, they share hard truths—and artful narratives—with fellow Iranians and viewers the world over.

Documenting Iran introduces key historical foundations of documentary filmmaking amid generations of political change—first under the shah and later the Islamic government—with a focus on contemporary filmmakers between 2000 and 2022. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic encounters, Vaziri describes the creative practices and pragmatic choices that provide documentarians relative independence from state censorship and other restrictions on artistic production. Relying on poetic aesthetics, observational filmmaking, international connections, and the accumulated knowledge of a tight-knit local community, filmmakers engage with controversial topics like women’s rights, marriage and divorce laws, environmental degradation, and encounters with Western culture. Documentarians have thus created an activist cinema both subtle and persuasive enough to challenge dogmatic rule and uphold progressive elements of Iranian society.

What can Aboriginal filmmaking reveal about Indigenous presence and futures?

The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, Dreaming Down the Track delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. It follows the social lives of projects throughout their production cycles, from planning and editing to screening, broadcasting, and after-images. Across its narrative sweep, this ethnography engages the film career of Kukatja elder Mark Moora to demonstrate the impact of filmmaking on how Aboriginal futures are collectively imagined and called forth.

William Lempert highlights a series of awakenings through which Moora ultimately came to view cinema as a process for catalyzing his family’s return to their home country of Mangkayi. This biographical media journey paints an intimate portrait of the inspiring possibilities and sobering limitations of Indigenous envisioning within settler states. Lempert traces how Moora’s life and films convey a multiplicity of Aboriginal experiences across time and space, from colonial contact to contemporary life in communities like Balgo, including the continued governmental attempts to undermine them.

Amid ongoing negotiations to establish the first treaties between Indigenous nations and Australian states, Dreaming Down the Track illustrates what is at stake in how Aboriginal–State relations are represented and understood, both within communities and for the broader public. Lempert stays true to Moora’s insight that film can preserve community stories for generations to come, toward the aim of enacting sovereign futures.