At age 30, Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. A Moon For My Father (2019), an essay film made in collaboration with her partner, the British sculptor Douglas White, positions Akbari’s illness within layers of personal and national history. Rich in texture and astonishingly intimate, Akbari’s film presents memory as a poetic, embodied experience. [More]

The Block Museum was honored to host Akbari for a screening and conversation on March 5, 2020. The filmmaker spoke with Northwestern professor of Screen Cultures Hamid Naficy after the screening to discuss using the languages of art and collaboration to tell her story.

“For me the most important thing is dialogue between two people. I believe that art is not with you and or me. Art is between us. Art is deep dialogue, deep conversation… This film is about transformation of the body and also it is about dialogue; dialogue between two different cultures, two different languages, two different genders, two different identities, and two different histories. But you have one similarity, and that is the language of art. Art is a global language. This language was an important deep connection between us.

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Trailer: Moon For My Father (2019)

The event was co-presented by Block Cinema with the Iranian American Fund for Cultural Programming and the Middle East and North African Studies program at Northwestern.