LFF 2024: My Stolen Planet

A photograph of Farahnaz Sharifi as a child in her film My Stolen Planet (2024).

We sit, all six or seven of us, in a small theatre on a weekend afternoon during the festival’s busy press schedule. Mostly femme (we’re sitting to watch a film about women’s experiences, after all), but varied nevertheless by gender presentation, age, race, class. We sit there, with our differences, and cry together as women dance across the screen in defiance of laws dictating that they are hidden behind doors. Behind borders. Behind media blackouts.
 
My Stolen Planet comprises documentarian Farahnaz Sharifi’s private home videos—she says she’s been addicted to recording her daily life since attending film school—and the illicit super-8 footage that she buys to archive life before Khomeini assumed power in Iran. Born during the 1979 Revolution, she recalls growing up in two worlds: one inside her home, where dancing and music and laughter prevailed; and the other outside in public, where the authorities demanded that women be concealed beneath hijabs. A photo of seven-year-old Farah in her back garden, smiling with her hijab in hand, gestures to the two lives she has lived within and outside the wall. In contrast to the violent anti-American imagery that Farah’s more contemporary footage reveals in downtown Tehran, with skulls replacing stars and bodies piled up as if blasted by bombs, the hijab to her is a home-grown weapon. Each piece of fabric, she says, represents ‘all of their power to control all of our lives.’
 
Farah can, however, retreat into her world of films and filming. She shares her archived footage, a planet of unknown provenance where now exiled Iranian women look directly into cameras held by friends, family, and lovers and thus reveal themselves. ‘I buy people’s memories,’ she says, scanning every frame of the celluloid strips with care; more than that, they are the memories of a people, a community that is all but erased from that other, outside world. ​As she describes what life was like in Iran before the Revolution, she conjures the ghosts of women past into being. They laugh, smile, hold babies. Hang out of car windows, put their arms around one another. They dance and sing, and dance some more. The blue-green blush of degradation may colour the old film stock, yet still you can see the women dancing. And Farah dances, too, at every opportunity. Where there is music and dancing there is life, and Iranian women, her film tells us, have an abundance of it.

Farah dances, too, at every opportunity. Where there is music and dancing there is life, and Iranian women, her film tells us, have an abundance of it.

But their lives can too easily be taken away. For the poignant normalcy of the family home (where Farah’s mother sits at the kitchen table, learning to use her daughter’s phone camera) is just a glance away from the militarised and alien planet outside. It’s in this juxtaposition, in the shot-reverse shot set up that Farah uses to document women’s lives from different angles, that My Stolen Planet is so effective. The Instagram aesthetic afforded by the smart phone camera—its portrait orientation creating letter-box stripes of black down either side of the screen—when inside the house quickly transforms into the kind of amateur, think-on-your-feet bystander footage that we associate with rolling news coverage when the women go outside to join protests.

Selfies give way to surreptitious mobile shots taken on the run or from car windows in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death (killed by Iranian forces in 2022 for not wearing her hijab, the young Kurdish woman’s death sparked mass protests with the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’). Intimate footage of Farah in domestic spaces are swapped for FaceTime calls from her new home in Germany; My Stolen Planet is a reminder that mobile phones are lifelines between distant worlds for so many.

Women dance across the screen in salvaged Super-8 footage (My Stolen Planet, 2024).

Amid so much violence, it’s hardly surprising that our small audience could not hold back tears. Rage, grief, and despair cannot be contained, and the women that Sharifi’s film give voice to are constrained by authoritarian rule, not a lack of will to be free. There is also that slight recognition, that odd moment of undeniable comparison, between what in the UK is called the Iranian ‘regime,’ and some of our own recent elected governments’ actions. Politicians’ efforts to undermine human rights (planning to deport people to Rwanda without consent), prevent protest (as per the Public Order Act 2023, or the targeting of pro-Palestinian figures), and wage ideological ‘culture wars’ against marginalised groups may not compare directly to the state-mandated violence felt by women in Iran – but they are distressing contextual experiences nonetheless.

Somehow, though—for me, at least—it’s not the violence that sparks the greatest emotional response. It’s the hope. It’s Farah’s friend declaring with optimism that ‘change is coming,’ and that they should continue ‘living life in beauty,’ a smile lighting up her face in the blue-white glow of the phone on a dark street at night. It's the beauty of Sharifi's filmmaking and the unwavering rhythm of the edit that insists their story is told. It’s the super-8 film that survives, moving those dancing women on and on and on through the ages. It’s the sitting-room karaoke, and the chants for freedom, and the always, always dancing, people’s bodies floating and twirling and liberated by defiance and abandon and joy, always moving, that reminded me that all of us, in whatever degree we feel the weight of authoritarianism, have life.

​It’s the voices of women singing in their homes and on the streets, their collective refusal reverberating between planets, their sound inescapable.

​It’s the living, in spite of it all.