Persian Culture

This screening brings together three films by artist and filmmaker Maryam Tafakory, whose work moves between essay film, archival inquiry, and poetic montage.

Daria’s Night Flowers, Razeh-del, and Mast-del draw on fragments of Iranian cinema, literature, and popular culture to explore desire, censorship, gender, and the politics of looking.
Working through repetition, erasure, and reassembly, Tafakory creates films that linger on what is withheld or forbidden, transforming absence into a space of reflection and resistance. These works invite the viewer into a slowed, attentive mode of spectatorship, where images and words circulate as traces rather than statements, and where cinema becomes a site of intimate, speculative thought.

Tickets are selling fast! Reservation link:

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/experiments-in-film-three-films-by-maryam-tafakory

We will have a discussion about the films at Barbican’s cinema bar after the screening.

What does Trump want with Iran? And what is the West's Iranian 'problem'? With Shabbir Lakha and Somayé.

A free event by London Debate. You need to reserve your ticket:

Join us for a special screening of Amu Darya: River to a Missing Sea, followed by a Q&A, a powerful documentary exploring the environmental and human stories surrounding the shrinking Amu Darya River. Once feeding the Aral Sea, this great Central Asian River has been dramatically depleted due to large-scale Soviet irrigation policies, transforming what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake into the youngest desert on Earth. Through personal testimonies from Uzbek and Karakalpak communities, the film shares oral histories of an ancient ecosystem—telling intimate stories of loss, adaptation, resilience, and hope as life continues to unfold along the river that now flows toward a missing sea.