Alongside my desk for two years at Sundance Institute, there was a framed poster of Maryam Keshavarz’ break-out film Circumstance. You could see Maryam’s signature on the bottom right-hand corner of the poster, a loving address to her supporters at Sundance. I know these details, but I’m skirting the imagery, the sexual tension between the girls on the poster. They could have been anywhere: two young lovers on a beach but they’re in Iran. My co-worker asked if I had seen the film, and when I said I hadn’t, she promptly sent me home with a link to a rental. My colleague knew me, a queer Arab-American, and knew I’d grown up in a conservative church. She knew I would connect with the film—and I did.
Circumstance is a beautiful and voracious film about two girls in Tehran, Atafeh and Shireen, friends from school who find themselves in a secret love affair in an increasingly conservative society. Atafeh’s elder brother, Mehran, a fundamentalist, takes a liking to Shireen and pursues her. Meanwhile, he installs security surveillance cameras in his family home in an effort to reform his parents’ and sister’s behavior. In the process, he discovers the girls are involved. Circumstance is not the only film of Maryam’s that addresses queer adolescence, attraction, and the betrayal of female intimacy, though this was her first and an important addition to western understandings of queerness in Iran. It is a film that relays the detailed apparatus of moral policing, a queer coming of age story in a world that continues to get smaller. While my world is literally and metaphorically miles apart from the world of these characters, the condition of hiding who one is, of being morally policed, rings true. It was not until recently that I was able to mentally disentangle my sexual orientation and gender identity from the social mores of the Charismatic Catholic community I was raised in. This is what I find so arresting about the women Maryam crafts in her films: despite the oppressive environment, the female characters possess a beautiful and willful arrogance of belonging, much like Maryam herself, finding space for self-expression despite surveillance, social rearing, or coercion. There is a tenacity of being in the face of hardship that Maryam seems able to conjure and wield for her characters, a lightness she herself possesses despite growing up in the midst of war. On a hot summer afternoon in June in West Hollywood, Maryam and I met at a French bakery on La Brea, a place covered in real and faux white marble. Maryam is open and friendly, her affect commanding even while she creates space for engagement. She has a matter-of-fact way of relating and telling stories, slipping into the more absurd aspects of her own personal experiences in a pragmatic tone. She relays difficult personal truths with frank whimsy and laughter: I think around the time I came out, I decided you have to live your own life. And you have to decide that you have a right to tell your own story. You have the right to build a world from your own experience even if it is based on your family. There is that part of you that needs that freedom. We speak quickly, excited to explore our overlapping life experiences, the complexity of morality, and our love of art. I feel her confidence from across the café’s table and see the ease with which Maryam lives and breathes it. I am curious about where this beautiful arrogance stems from and how it allows the veracity in her films. The genesis of Maryam’s artistic pursuits, were spurred, in part like mine, by the events of 9/11. As a then graduate student at the University of Michigan, Maryam recalls federal agents threatening academics at the University, how they co-opted academic space and flooded the campus with the heavy weight of authoritarianism: When 9/11 happened, I knew I was not going to stay in academia. At the time, I was trying to shift into film. Because it was very reminiscent of the hostage crises in Iran when I was growing up in New York City as a little kid, and all that rhetoric in the news…I had this weird sense of déjà vu…like it was happening all over again. I can’t remember which paper it was, but it said, “those bastards” on the cover, you know. And all of my family lived in New York City, and my brothers…And somehow the Other was the enemy again. For Maryam, morality is as complex as the people who attempt to police it. She does not shy away from this reality in any of her films, presenting empathetic characters who make choices that are not always palatable. As a high school student in 2001, I recall seeing images of men who looked like my brothers splattered across the news, brandished as Islamic extremists. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of the events unfolding in my living room and then in Iraq. My own experience as a third generation Lebanese American felt removed but somehow implicated in what I was seeing. I was too assimilated, too removed from my own family’s history to understand the pain of forced migration due to war and destitution. Without real knowledge of my kin’s history, Maryam’s account feels like something tangible I can hold onto, a history shared through imposed misconceptions and cultural conflations about the Middle East.
During my graduate studies in cultural anthropology, I worked with a number of Arab American studies academics at the University of Michigan, researching the effects of 9/11 on notions of citizenship and belonging within local Arab and Muslim American communities. At the time of 9/11, I was in high school twenty miles from Maryam and the University crackdown. It would be seven years until I began to work within this community and understand the residual effects of migration on a people. For Maryam, history repeating itself spurred a new life direction: It was all kind of an intuitive process. So, 9/11 happened and my wife at the time was a photographer and cinematographer. And as a response to what was happening, I had been taking some film classes at City College, and I thought, “You know what, I really want to make this film.” And it was just kind of a response about this Arab woman living in San Francisco who was overwhelmed by what was happening and escapes into this fantasy world. It was called Sanctuary. And the setting is a surreal space where she walks out of a bathroom into a field that has all of these deconstructed elements. And she encounters different versions of herself at different times in her life. I love that Maryam unfolds a surreal fantasy world from her protagonist’s bathroom, a private space of banal self-reflection where the horrors of a limitless self are encountered, a self that cannot escape the imposed perceptions of an Islamophobic society. Torments of inefficacy. Such clandestine migrations, of bodies becoming peripheries and off limits, are the things of queer lives, of an historical present, of Atafeh and Shireen, the teenage lovers in Maryam’s Circumstance, and of my own young life. |
Atafeh and Shireen, are open to restricted love in an increasingly conservative Iran. The girls are unable to take the religious state’s disciplinary measures seriously; the world appears too absurd in the face of something as unpredictable as love. Borders are unintentionally and invariably crossed, as Atafeh and Shireen imagine kissing and touching each other more often than they are able to in real life. They slip into fantasy to escape the limits of their reality, a fantasy still marred by the ever-present eye of a God and zealous brother seeking to control their desires.
Maryam’s early work inhabits the pain of young, restricted expressions of queer intimacy, and the nuisance of hetero fulfillment. She is undaunted in portraying what is so prohibitive about imposed love, and I wonder what makes Maryam so impervious and unshakeable in her convictions.
She describes showing her first film to her family and being met with convivial laughter, and her brother’s reply: I shot the film and I showed it to my family over Christmas and it was hilarious because one of my brothers said, “this is not a movie! You shouldn’t go into film.” But my younger brother was like, “Let’s go to film school and change the world. Let’s apply to NYU.” Agreeing with her younger brother, she applied to NYU: I was so arrogant when I had to interview…I think it’s why I won the full scholarship…I said “I am on this journey. You are either on this journey with me or you are not.” The interviewer asked, "Why do you want to go to NYU?" To which I replied, "Actually, I don’t need to go to NYU. Let me reverse this question: Why should I go to NYU?" When you are on a journey you can ask how is this going to help me get to where I want to go? You are either dedicated to doing something or you are not…if you can be deterred by that, then maybe it’s not the right thing for you. You should feel like you are on a track. Maryam’s description of clear purpose is intimidating. Her own will defies her circumstance again and again. A will, perhaps, that was helped along by her travel to Iran throughout her childhood. Trips that still surface in conversation with her mother: “But that area is dangerous!” my mother would say. And I would reply, “Iran during the war was probably less dangerous than New York in the 80’s!” After the 1979 revolution, Maryam would tape photos of Michael Jackson to her body, hiding them beneath her clothes to sneak the photos past customs for cousins who were no longer able to access such things. A secret shared across borders. An act of love. We mused in wonder at how she was eventually able to tape whole magazines to her body. To be rendered unimportant and therefore invisible provides an opening for subversive acts. Maryam encountered many questions about her identity throughout the making of Circumstance. She recalls producers asking her stupefied, “Don’t all Muslim women wear the hijab?” Laughing, Maryam remarks that she relishes in this aspect of her work as it forces audience members to question what they think they know about Iranian, Muslim, or queer identity. “We are everywhere. You don’t even know we are sitting right next to you.” I had a feeling of fear when I made Circumstance, I was quite terrified. I was terrified because there was a point where you have to just not care anymore. I have to write to tell this story. When I began working with Arab and Muslim Americans in 2008, I was particularly sensitive to how easily the flames of Islamophobia could be fanned after the Bush administration waged a culture war on those communities. I thought about stereotypes of Muslims as rigid and dogmatic and I wondered if the character of Mehran, Atafeh’s brother, played into stereotypes about Islam being a “brutal” religion. For Maryam, morality is as complex as the people who attempt to police it. She does not shy away from this reality in any of her films, presenting empathetic characters who make choices that are not always palatable. She describes one of the final scenes of the film in which Mehran, is seen with Shireen on a bed: I’ve gotten so many questions about that last scene. “’Does he [Mehran] rape her? Does she reach out? What’s that about?”’’ It’s complex. He is very hurt, and he is in power. I mean you talk about Foucault and where power lies… There are so many [power] layers…
She is at work on a movie about a big family secret that speaks to how her family defines themselves as immigrants, about her mother and how they came to terms with each other. Just as Maryam begins to relay the family secret history, the bakery echoes with the sounds of enthusiastic customers.
The film is a comedy, a fact that rattles her nerves. She notes Iranians pride themselves on their silence and stature, making comedy a difficult genre to work in. When she first told her mother she would be making this film, her mother replied, “How can you do this to me?” Maryam laughs. She put herself on the line to make her debut film, knowing the story would upset so many in her family. She speaks with empathy for her younger self, daring to tell her story. As I think about my story, unfolding alongside this interview, I remember how the arts carry us to face inner truths, not a disciplined hard truth, but a fearlessness of lived reality. I left the bakery with the film’s tag line as if in neon in my mind: Don’t you want to change your circumstance? 
Rachel Yezbick is a visual artist, working in experimental documentary, installation and performance, who uses her training in cultural anthropology to inform the issues she tackles as a maker. She is a published author and recent co-recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts grant. Most recently, she was commissioned to create new performance works for Liquid Architecture and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, and The Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. She has produced public programming for Sundance Institute and the City of Los Angeles, taught at colleges and universities, and her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Melbourne, and Glasgow, and in group exhibitions and performances at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, REDCAT, Materials & Applications, The Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Glasgow International 2018, among others.
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