Elsewhere Art House presents

Fear

A film by Mazyar Mahan · 2021 · Short film · 6 min

Synopsis

The everyday anxiety of a body under state control.

Fear focuses on the psychological effects of state control over women’s bodies and the everyday anxiety produced by compulsory veiling.

Set in a winter forest of fallen trees, a dancer moves between stillness and struggle, the scarf in her hands shifting from burden to release.

Director’s statement

Control over women’s bodies in Iran does not only happen in the street. It settles into the body itself, as vigilance, as a constant low hum of anxiety about being seen. I wanted to film that feeling rather than explain it.

With dancer and choreographer Shahrzad Hamzeh, I took the question of compulsory veiling into a winter forest, a place without walls or watchers, and let her body answer it. The scarf becomes a partner, a weight, something to hold and to release. The fallen trees felt like the right landscape: uprooted, yet still standing in their own way.

Fear is short and wordless because the experience it describes rarely finds words.

— Mazyar Mahan

Stills