The Commonplace Unravelled: The Films of Tara Najd Ahmadi

 The Commonplace Unravelled: The Films of Tara Najd Ahmadi

A wooden drawing figure is gently positioned in pots, pans and jars to go through the process of making a simple Iranian dish of egg, rice and pickles. We view his level of resistance scientifically illustrated in diagrams appearing after each process. We are witnessing a simple domestic act while a wooden human figure goes through various forms of pressure and oppression. The traces of paint over the analogue frames remind us of the hand crafted nature of the film itself. This is a domestic film with a twist. Tara Najd Ahmadi sets the tone for her future work with this earlier 4 minute short film, Measuring the Levels of Resistance.

She is an artist filmmaker whose work creates a sense of intimate closeness. At the same time she raises alertness towards what lies beneath the layers of daily life. There is a subtle humour, a deliberate lightness of touch in how film after film she delves deeper into conditions in which commonplace is mixed with social and political complexities. She uses different mediums from analogue formats, home movies, segments of cinematic references, direct on film painting and animation techniques. Her editing style is punctuated with abrupt cuts. Her narration is casual and intimate like reading a diary. Her short sharp sentences along with the punctuated editing style, leaves us with parcels of thoughts and images. Just as in the game of pass the parcel, we unpack layer upon layer of untold memories, histories and conflicts that are deemed to be too minor to be told, or doomed to be forgotten. Each film, in its way, is an invitation to resist forgetting.

Handmade artifacts, like the hand that types on an old school type writer, animated dancing dolls, sleepless dolls in cardboard houses and a mushroom dissected in an absurd scientific way, function like the word game Tara invents in her film Productive Frustration. The game that starts nonsensical but gradually hidden meanings are revealed and questions are raised. How can those who move from their countries, the migrants, the displaced and the replaced, tell the untold histories and resist against the powers of forgetting and normalisation? How can this be done without falling into the trap of clichés that are driven by the forces of the market place? In Productive Frustration Tara says she chooses to find and walk in this path. She has been walking this path for more than a decade now.

The films in this retrospective present her work in the last 12 years. Each film in an indirect way, frames a moment in the recent history. Through conversation with friends and juxtaposing of these conversations with what seems like random selection of images from daily life, her style might look like essay films but same as her earlier films, they don’t fully confine to definitions. There are essay films with a twist. She points to subjects. She gives us hints and we are left to follow her lead long after the films are finished.

The films of Tara Najd Ahmadi will be screened in Watershed Cinema on 28'th March 2024 As part of BEEF Presents 3 and programmed by Niyaz Saghari.