Documentary film screening: 'Guerrilla Archive'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:30 pm to 6:45 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS
- Room
- Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT)
- Event type
- Film screening
About this event
We are delighted to welcome you to a documentary film screening of Guerrilla Archive, jointly hosted by the SOAS Middle East Institute (SMEI) and the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) Project (University of Exeter). The film screening (50 minutes) will be followed by a Q&A session with one of the filmmakers, Shahrzad Mojab, and a drinks reception.
Guerrilla Archive (2025), a documentary film produced by CNRS and directed by Chowra Makaremi, with Setar Faithi and Shahrzad Mojab, explores a previously unseen visual archive – photographs, sounds, and videos documenting the daily lives of Kurdish Peshmergas after the 1979 Iranian revolution. This documentary film traces the threads of militant memory, between armed struggle and community organising, within Komala, a Kurdish communist party opposed the Islamic State. Guerrilla Archive offers an immersion into the counter-archives of violence, where documenting becomes a political act.
Registration
This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Seating is allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
About the filmmakers
Chowra Makaremi is a CNRS tenured researcher at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, EHESS, Paris. Her research explores border control, detention, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic, and state violence through archival ethnography. Her publications include Aziz’s Notebook at the Hearth of the Iranian Revolution (2011) and Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a Revolutionary Uprising in Iran (2023), winner of the France Culture/Arte prize for best essay. She directed Hitch. An Iranian Story (2019) and leads the ERC research program OFF-SITE on violence, state formation, and memory politics in post-revolutionary Iran.
Shahrzad Mojab is Professor Emerita of Women and Gender Studies and Education at the University of Toronto. Internationally recognised for her work on gender, war, displacement, and violence, she researches Marxist feminism and the revolts of women, students, and nationalities in the SWANA region. Her publications include Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge (2017), Women of Kurdistan (2021), and Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance (2024). She makes research accessible through arts-based practices, collaborating with artists in storytelling, dance, drama, painting, and film. She curated The Archive of Defiance and The Art of Resistance in the Middle East.
Chair
Adam Hanieh, Director of the SOAS Middle East Institute.
