Translating hyper absurdity through a liminal position by Babak Parham

The objective of this artistic research has been to reflect on the conditions for filmmakers in Sweden and identify expectations, contradictions and subject positions available for myself within this discursive field. As a point of departure, I use three letters of rejection that I have received during my two years as a student at the Stockholm University of the Arts. The first rejection centers what experiences can be imagined for me, as an immigrant filmmaker. It juxtaposes experiences made in Iran and Sweden as opposite and impossible to combine. The second rejection is in relation to content and story-telling, which raises questions about translation as a dimension of film production. I this section, I argue that while it is my intention to make experiences of hyper-absurdity in Iran penetrable for an audience in Sweden, too much concern over the audience may deteriorate the artistic process. The third rejection constructs myself and my fellow director as immigrant others, scrutinizing our ability to make a film in Swedish, about Swedish subjects. In this section, I explore the meaning of diaspora and how it shapes the conditions of film production. The artistic research is summarized in the final section where I suggest a number of strategies forward in order to move away from the taken-for-granted role of immigrant filmmaker(s). Key concepts: documentary film, diaspora, translation

Amnesia

I was born in 1984, in the aftermaths of the Iranian Revolution, which had shifted to the Islamic Revolution without anybody understanding how or when. The Iran-Iraq war was intensifying, the lines for bread and milk growing longer - or so I have been told.

With me in their arms, my parents crossed the border to the Soviet Union, the geographic space which is now the Republic of Azerbaijan. I was barely one year old, my parents weary of the long and dangerous journey over mountains. Happy to be among familiar faces, they were met by leaders from the political party for which they had risked not only their own lives, but that of their families. But the man, who had been a comrade of my father, looked into his eyes and said to the Soviet border guard that he did not know these people, that they weren’t part of the movement. It seemed he suffered from amnesia. So they were sent back across the border to Iran. I don’t remember this either.

My first memories are from years later, and even then, I’m not sure which parts are my own and what are made up after hearing the stories of others. What are scenes that I have seen and what are pictures from albums and the walls of my grandparents home, merged in my mind and re-organized as memories of my own.

For a very long time, I haven’t paid attention to the archive of memories, neither mine, nor that of my family members or friends. As a journalist, the archives of the public service seemed much more intriguing. I even cringed at artistic work that was centered around the artists themselves. “Come on! Get over yourself!” I wanted to say. Off course I had the manners not to. But I never understood what was interesting about this introspection. It felt self absorbed and out of touch with “the real world”.

I, on the other hand, wanted to tell the interesting, important and relevant stories. As a radio journalist, I got a chance to interview famous persons, artists, politicians. However, something about the format soon became mundane to me. It was the same routine questions, the short format, staying on the surface of things. The most interesting stories always came when the microphone was turned off and the most exciting parts of peoples lives were seldom their work. Through journalism, I came to be interested in stories behind the headlines. The multitude of micro-stories that build up to large events. Events like the Iranian Islamic Revolution. And the more I thought of it, the more I sensed the ground moving beneath my feet, opening a crack between the world in which I live and the world on my mind. If I tell my story, our stories, in this world to which we are a cliché - who is going to listen and what will they understand?

Truth is, I never had the opportunity to digest the events that dominated our lives as children and youth growing up in post-revolutionary Iran. The morality propaganda, the war, the absurdities of our educational system; it was all obstacles that we found ways to avoid, and these ways became so normalized yet so painful, at least I preferred not to think about it. Like the political activists who had turned into gatekeepers of the border, I choose amnesia. “This is my life now. Just do the right thing” I told myself.

When my son was five years old, he asked why we live in Sweden. This made me realize, that no matter how neutral I attempt to act in relation to our past, the shadows of migration will stay over me, my children, and as the atmosphere in Europe seems, for many generations more. Soon after, I accidentally found a publication made by my wifes great grandfather in the 1950’s. I showed it to her and she, who grew up as the child of Iranian refugees in Sweden, couldn’t read it, because she cannot read in Persian. I realized I’m in a liminal position, not necessarily between Sweden and Iran but between migrants who arrived here long before me and my friends who remained in Iran, between different narratives of Iranian history and the story of those who left. We could have been among those who arrived here in the 1980’s, but a twist of history and a random dude blinded by ideology sent us back “to fight for the cause”.

The stories I want to tell are not necessarily those of my family, but those of us who have inhabited liminal positions for all of these years. Migration is one practice of border crossing, but in Iran, we embodied the borders, or to paraphrase Pouran Djampour, the borders crossed our bodies (Djampour 2018). Everything about us was illegal, our hair, our beard, our music, our jeans, our drinks, our hands holding our girlfriends hands. One generation before us could end up in prison for what we did. The younger generation is dying to fight for rights beyond this conditioned lives. Also in this sense, my generation was in-between, part of neither the 1979 revolution or the 2022 Mahsa Amini movement. Maybe this notion of neither/nor is a construction in itself. As Derrida discusses, any position requires a counterpart, as we create meaning through contradictions and negations (Derrida 1978). I say my generation is not revolutionary, because we have not lived through a successful revolution, but perhaps this statement should be deconstructed. What are the elements of our collective history and how can this be told through the lense of documentary film?

When my son asked why we are here and my wife could not take part of her own family history because of a language deficit that most probably our children, like many children in diaspora, will grow up to have, it became clear to me that the line between what I had perceived as serious and relevant journalism and intimate storytelling through art, is also a construction in my mind. I thought to myself that if I don’t tell my story, our story of these liminal experiences that fit no box, nobody else will. Our collective history as Iranians accessible in Swedish or English, will give my children a limited and skewed image. A cliché in which they imagine me on the back of a camel and their mother belly-dancing while kissing my feet. All representations are one of infinite versions of a story, which has no beginning nor an ending. Why not add my own, biased version, no matter how introspective and self-absorbed it may seem?