Middle Eastern Trauma in the Globalizing Era: Between Self-Expression and Neo-Orientalism

The author looks at the articulation of traumatic experiences within Iranian cinema, particularly within two recent films, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024) and Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet (2024), with a contextualization in the contemporary festival circuit and regimes of visuality afforded by current media practices. A special consideration is granted to women’s stories set against Middle Eastern backdrop that are produced and consumed by citizens in Western liberal democracies. Considering the association between wide distribution and formal innovation within familiar conventions, it becomes particularly relevant – given transnational production practices of films set in Iran and the viral global circulation of amateur footage, sparking formal innovation – to look at how traumatic experiences can be expressed audiovisually and often against the restrictive codes of classic narration. While the necessity to appeal to – or at least be understood by – a global audience can lead to neo-Orientalist patterns of articulation, the essay argues that several films have developed quite sophisticated expressive means.