Memories of a Window

In 2022, at the height of the crackdown on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement, mass arrests and the killing of demonstrators drove many to express their anger from their windows. From apartments, universities and cars, thousands of videos were filmed to document the perpetration of state violence. Shirin Alizadeh, filming an arrest from the window of her car, was shot dead. Mehraneh Salimian was a film student at the time. With the help of her classmate Amin Pakparvar, she addresses a filmed letter to Shirin, using these videos – a genuine counter-archive confronting the dangers of erasing the people’s memory. She accompanies her letter with an intimate text in which she relates her own experience of resistance behind those windows – the very act of filming, bearing witness and archiving at any cost, simply in order to survive. Brimming with brutality and poetry, Memories of a Window is a tribute to the last words of Shirin Alizadeh: Film it.

Aurélien Marsais