"Speaking Through Pain: Feminist Testimony and Diasporic Resistance in Born in Evin" by Tania Ahmadi '17 has been published in Cinema Iranica. The essay examines "two key ways in which Born in Evin dismantles power hierarchies, state violence, and political persecution."
Born in Evin, a movie by filmmaker Maryam Zarzee, follows Zarzee's quest to understand the circumstances of her birth within the infamous Ivīn (Evin) Prison in Iran during Ayatollah Khumaynī’s regime. Ahmadi's essay "argues that Zaree’s work functions as both a personal act of testimony and a political intervention against collective amnesia, substantiated through her investigation into the deep intergenerational trauma caused by political imprisonment."
Cinema Iranica is published by The University of Toronto in collaboration with the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation (EIF), and is an "authoritative compendium on all aspects of film and motion-picture production in Iran." The compendium provides peer-reviewed articles by experts in Iranian studies on movies, genres, film movements, filmographies, directors, composers, stars, cinematographers, set designers, sound specialists, editors, choreographers, film studios, movie theaters, film posters, film critics, and audiences, among others.
Ahmadi is an independent film scholar, writer, and translator based in New York. She holds an MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University and a BA from UC Berkeley. Her writing and translations have been featured in Conversations with Kiarostami (Woodville Press, 2019), Film Comment, Jump Cut, The Spool, Projektor, Sabzian, and Peyk magazine. Her academic work includes contributions to Narrating the City (Tehran Has No Soul!) and The Handbook of Iranian Cinema (Women with Fighting Spirits). She leads the editorial team at Docunight and serves on the nominating committee and a reviewer for Non-Fiction, at The Gotham Film & Media Institute.
