OPENER
Short Silent Spectators, an audiovisual diary by Yasaman Tamizkar and Lizzy Zaanen, 2023

PERSEPOLIS
Tehran, 1978: Eight-year-old Marjane dreams of the future and sees herself as a prophet who will save the world. She grows up with loving, modern, and intellectual parents and has a strong bond with her grandmother. She follows the events leading up to the revolution—and ultimately the fall of the Shah’s regime—with great enthusiasm.

When the Islamic Republic is established, a new era begins in which “revolutionary commissars” strictly monitor people’s behavior and clothing. Marjane is forced to wear a veil and begins to see herself as a rebellious revolutionary.

Soon, the war with Iraq brings bombings, shortages, and the disappearance of loved ones. At the same time, internal repression grows increasingly harsh. In these difficult circumstances, her sharp tongue and rebellious attitude cause problems. Her parents therefore decide to send her to Austria to protect her.

In Vienna, at the age of fourteen, Marjane experiences a second revolution: that of adolescence. She discovers freedom and the confusion of love, but also experiences the pain of exile, loneliness, and the feeling of being different.

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Although Persepolis is not a recent film, it continues to circulate widely among Western audiences. As an autobiographical work by Marjane Satrapi, it traces a movement from Iran to France, and with it a shift in language, context, and self-understanding. Migration emerges here not as a resolved narrative, but as an ongoing negotiation shaped by friction and adjustment.

Its tone — dry, at times cutting — moves between distance and intimacy without smoothing over the contradictions of that experience. At the same time, the film sketches a portrait of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, not as a neutral backdrop but as a culturally specific space where new forms of estrangement and recognition take shape.

Set around the Iranian Revolution, Persepolis traces how political upheaval filters into everyday life. What stands out is not its historical distance, but how persistently these tensions continue to resonate in the present.