Hal Kitchen
One could spend days debating the impact that the rise of the smartphone has had on civilization, weighing its costs and its benefits, what it has done to us socially and politically, but one massive point on the board in its favor is what it has done for those living under oppression. A nation of people, everyone one of whom has in their pockets a video camera and access to a global audience is harder to subjugate, delude and silence than one without those tools. A voice is not a means to liberation in itself, but you can no longer consider yourself free without it. Consider the genocide going on in Palestine and its neighboring territories right now: without the Arab people’s own video evidence on social media, most of the rest of the world would be even more clueless about what Israel is doing to its neighbors. My Stolen Planet is a treatise on the power of the camera and its role as an essential tool in constructing cultural and personal memory, connecting us to our shared history and even to our personal history. It can be hard not to feel disconnected even from our own memories if there’s nothing concrete and tangible to support them, especially when there is a vast propaganda network commanding you to believe something different.
That is the situation Farahnaz Sharifi, the director and subject of My Stolen Planet found herself in. Her birth concurrent with Iran’s cultural revolution and the rise of radical Islamic rule, she grew up living a double life. A public one, where she existed soberly and meekly, a sallow face peering out from beneath a hijab, and a private one, full of dancing, music, laughter and films. Especially films. She took to recording everything around her and subsequently to collecting and archiving home video footage left behind by those who fled the new regime’s rules. My Stolen Planet is the fruit of this lifelong effort, combining this decaying archive material with Sharifi’s own footage to construct an impression of the “stolen world” that the regime denied her and that despite the best efforts of revolutionary women like her, it continues to deny the women of Iran.
The collage-like effect of My Stolen Planet does create an ephemeral experience, exploring the effort to crystallize memories, moments and contextualize fragments of footage, a process mirrored by the declining health of Sharifi’s mother, whose dementia is slowly corroding the last living memories of a pre-revolution Iran. This elusiveness is compounded by both the nature and the content of the footage. The earlier sections of the film dominated by crumbling Super-8 images, flickering and fracturing as if they are disintegrating the moment they’re exposed to the projector’s light. And the emotional peaks and troughs the film takes you through are even more disorientating, in its first five minutes presenting you with both its protagonists birth and the on camera execution of a political prisoner, and this struggle of life against death plays out throughout the film. The camera has long been thought of in terms of a human endeavor to forestall our mortality, to preserve a moment and allow it to continue existing in some form, and in the context of protest and execution, images of those martyred to the cause of women’s liberation take on a particular political significance in this way. The fixed image allows their contribution to the cause to persevere long after their own deaths.
However, so too do the images of joy and it is those that My Stolen Planet privileges. The bulk of its slight 88-minute runtime is comprised of footage of Sharifi, her friends and comrades as they hang out, celebrate milestones and discuss their hopes or lack thereof for the future. These scenes constitute the “life” and freedom that stand in opposition of the death and oppression on the streets outside, with a clear inside/outside dichotomy in the lives of Iranian women. Between the domestic spaces where they are safe to live and express themselves as they choose and the public spaces where they are vulnerable and subject to the sharia law imposed on them, and where so much as going outdoors without headscarves would leave them at risk of detainment or even death. The titular event of “theft” occurs when Sharifi’s home is raided and the safe space she and her friends and family had created is invaded, tainted and colonized by the authorities.
Most Western audiences’ perspectives on Iranian life are limited to the fractious saber-rattling between Iran and the US on the news and the handful of pop cultural signifiers scattered throughout mainstream media. Some of the more curious and enlightened may have seen Persepolis and have the rough understanding of the cultural revolution and its impact that estimable work imparts, but My Stolen Planet adds its own distinct and uncompromising voice, covering many of the same ideas of women’s liberation and struggle with the additional context of modern events such as Iran’s boycott of British and American vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic and the catastrophic effect that had on its populace or the Iranian military’s murder of the 176 passengers of Flight 752. In her joint role as subject and curator Sharifi has composed a fearless chorus of defiant women living out a daily jihad in the name of liberation, and it is a profoundly brave, politically charged and meaningful work they have brought forth.
