
Shirin Neshat at home. Photography by Derek Peck

After years working in fine art photography and video, Shirin had the chance to direct her first feature, an adaptation of a controversial Persian novella by Shahrnush Parsipur set during the 1953 CIA-backed coup that reinstalled the Shah of Iran. The story recounts the lives of five women set against this socio-political backdrop (although in her film Neshat chose to focus only on four of them). Always poetic and deeply symbolic, Shirin’s style wasn’t an obvious one to develop into narrative film. I had always wanted to make a movie, she says. But I was so intimidated to work with language and dialogue. That was the scariest part for me. Fortunately I had Shoja to collaborate with, and he was incredibly important to the project. We worked together very well. She pauses for an instant and smiles. I think we only blew up at each other once, right? Shoja, who has been tapping away at his laptop, adding details to Shirin’s stories, and smoking a cherished, hand-rolled cigar, smiles back. Yes, about once, he says.