Screening #5 The Newborns by Kianoush Ayari

In solidarity with the people of Iran, this edition turns to an unfinished fragment of Iranian film history: the never-completed film The Newborns by Kianoush Ayari. Shot in the spring of 1979, the film captures a revolution unfolding in real time. Following the regime change, however, the film never received a screening permit and remained loosely edited, shelved in the archive of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), out of which it was smuggled and digitized three decades later. What value do these fragments of everyday life – neither tied to a time before nor after the revolution – hold today? What visions of possible futures do they project? 

Introduced by Nadica Denić, with responses by Alireza Rabiei Kenari and Beri Shalmashi. 

About the Speakers

Beri Shalmashi is a Dutch writer and filmmaker with Iranian Kurdish heritage. Recently, she won the prestigious Zilveren Camera Storytelling Award with Big Village, an interactive film on the resistance of the Kurds against the Islamic Republic of Iran. She works as an advisor to the Netherlands Film Fund and is head of debate center Avanti. 

Alireza Rabiei Kenari is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), where he works on the project From Alleyways to Mediascapes: Micro-Resistance to Iranian Militarism (2010s–present), examining how everyday practices in Iran have become acts of micro-resistance against pervasive state control and militarized ideology. 

Nadica Denić is a film scholar and curator focused on the entanglement of film and contemporary political developments, with specific interest in migration, conflict, and risk. She currently works as a Lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.