Murmurs in the Distance

Murmurs in the Distance begins with an encounter with a gap: the absence of a substantial historical and visual record of the women’s protests of March 8, 1979 in Iran. Through photographs, recordings, testimonies, and archival fragments, three artists from another generation, living in different countries, search for what has been preserved, what has disappeared, and find their own reflections along the journey. The archive becomes both a source and a place for questioning. The short documentary Iranian Women’s Liberation Movement: Year Zero (1979) offers one of the few surviving visual traces of the protests, while testimonies bring other forms of memory into the present. Rather than reconstructing a complete history, the film stays with these fragments and silences, asking how an archive shapes what can be remembered, seen, and understood as history.