2022

GER, IR, 2022 - 19:50'

Full HD color, 21:9, Sound

English, Farsi

Subtitles in German, English, Farsi

Xposed Queer Film Festival, Berlin, 2023

Arche Film Festival, Berlin, 2023

Fluctoplasma, Hamburg, 2022

Grrl Haus Cinema, Berlin, 2022

Altonale, Hamburg, 2022

LA Underground Film Forum - Honorable Mentions, 2022

For Roya (farsi "dream, vision"), Zeeba uses video footage from her* first and at the same time very last trip back to Iran after she* had to leave the country in the 1990s. Zeeba constructs a half-documentary, half-fictional narrative that multi-voicedly reflects on the concepts of belonging and upheaval with desires, dreams, and dissolved self-constructions. Roya is an Essayfilm that deals with the exoticizing gaze of a Western audience. The explanatory comma plays an important role: To whom do I tell my story, to whom is it addressed? What role do memories play in artistic image production?  The film operates through opening up different modes of relationality ("Beziehungsweisen") between narration and experiential space. Thus, the narrative voice addresses different readings of Ornament and Orientalism in a Western context, addressing the audience directly and, in doing so, engages in an intimate conversation about localizations of queer belonging, politics of image production, the body, and the associated storytelling in direct address to the audience.