Documentary | DVD
Director: Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz
Ethnicity: South Asian
Subjects: Family, Identity, Personal Stories, Relationships, Women, World Wide Diaspora
Inheritance (2012) is a personal documentary film that illuminates diasporic identity formation in the shadow of Iranian gender politics and the Islamic Revolution. Inside her mother’s home, the filmmaker excavates the detritus that cushioned her splintering family as they traversed the uneven terrains of Revolution, divorce and eventually, self-imposed exile.
Inheritance unfolds through a collage of images, forms, voices and eras. Faded footage of the polls where millions voted for an Islamic republic pipe in through a television in the U.S. thirty years later. Impressions of an absent father swirl amidst fragments of historical memory. The quotidian clangings of a family’s kitchen collide against the shrieks of a political system in turmoil.
Vulnerable and honest, Inheritance can spark much-needed conversation about the emergence of the Iranian American community as a legitimate, complex and powerful voice within North American cultural politics.