Mania Akbari

A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.

Three attempts at reconnecting with often traumatic pasts, all leading to flights from home and the need for personal reinvention. A documentary triptych of many layers and emotions, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected ways.

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed.

The subject of the film is male-female relationships. Composed of 7 vignettes, "20 Fingers" features Mania Akbari and Bijan Daneshmand as a contemporary Iranian couple. The film is an intense, bumpy series of conversations and sometimes quarrels reflecting the problems facing Iranian men and women and the struggle between modernism and tradition, liberalism and conservatism.

A short documentary on the latest film by Mania Akbari titled, From Tehran to London. The film takes a closer look at Akbari’s latest boundary-pushing film that displays females dancing for the first time in Iranian cinema after the revolution. Through the lens of critical analysis with a touch of Freudian psychoanalysis, the documentary comments on how the themes of dance, death, homosexuality, censorship and devastation come to light through the actor’s dialogues and symbols in the film.

Mania Akbari’s From Tehran to London (2012), has a Russian-doll structure. It begins with Akbari shooting her latest film entitled Women Do Not Have Breasts about a couple, the young poet and writer Ava and her upper-class older husband Ashkan, who live in a large, beautiful – yet isolated – house in the hilly outskirts of the city. Household workers Maryam and Rahim attend to their needs. But despite their comfortable lives, Ava is increasingly dissatisfied and estranged in her relationship with Ashkan. What seems to have been an exciting relationship in the past is now little more than a series of mutual reproaches, as Ashkan incessantly tries to change Ava into someone she isn’t – a dutiful wife.

An epistolary feature film: a cinematic discourse between a British director Mark Cousins, and an Iranian actress and director Mania Akbari which extends the concept of "essay film" with startling confrontations in the arenas of cultural issues, gender politics and differing artistic sensibilities. A unique journey into the minds of two exceptional filmmakers which becomes a love affair on film.

Mania Akbari collaborates with British sculptor Douglas White to coin a tender fusion of langauge, where a meeting of cinema and sculpture investigates the processes of physical and psychological destruction and renewal. Begun a matter of weeks after first meeting, the film charts a deepening artistic and personal relationship exploring the nature of skin, family, death, water, desire and, throughout, a powerful will to form. Akbari looks into the connection between her body and the political history of Iran, investigating the relationship between her own physical traumas and the collective political memory of her birthplace. As she undergoes surgeries on a body decimated by cancer, remembrance and reconstruction provide a framework for investigating how bodies are traumatised, censored and politicized, and yet ultimately remain a site of possibility.