La Familia

Essay film in development

Drawing on counter-archives from personal and community-based sources, La Familia retraces a road trip taken with my family from Austria to Iran in the 1970s. By mapping the political shifts across Europe over time, the film circles back to contemporary migration and border politics and, crucially, to Iran’s fractured relationship with the West. Entangling my subjective experience as a child migrant from revolutionary Iran with contemporary migration politics, La Familia troubles perspectives on identity, belonging and political responsibilities. Disrupting representational archival methodologies, La Familia voices the demand for its viewer to ask not what am I seeing but how am I looking? The journey is, for the viewer (as it is for the filmmaker), a question of self-interrogation: from what position am I doing the looking?