The film runs 100 minutes long and will be shown in Persian with English subtitles. A Q&A with the film's director, Sepideh Farsi, and Mossavar-Rahmani Center Associate Research Scholar, Sareh Afshar, will follow the screening.

La Sirène (The Siren)

1980. Southern Iran. The people of Abadan have been fighting an Iraqi siege. Amongst them is the 14-year-old Omid, who chose to stay in the city with his grandfather, waiting for his elder brother to return from the frontline. But how can you resist in a war without taking up arms? Then Omid finds an abandoned ship in Abadan’s harbor. Is this the answer to saving the people he loves?

Sepideh Farsi

Sepideh Farsi is a Franco-Iranian film director known for her poignant exploration of identity and exile. Born in Iran, she left the country in 1984 to study mathematics in Paris but soon shifted her focus to the visual arts, beginning with photography before transitioning to filmmaking. Farsi's films, celebrated for their bold storytelling, have consistently challenged the Iranian regime. Since 2009, she has been unable to return to Iran due to her activism and the critical nature of her work. All of her films remain banned in the country. In February 2023, her first animated feature, The Siren (La Sirène), premiered as the opening film of the Panorama section at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival. The film later won Best Animated Film at the 16th Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Gold Coast, Australia, in November 2023.

Sareh Afshar

Sareh Z Afshar (she/او) is a writer, translator, scholar, and storyteller. Currently an Associate Research Scholar at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, she is a graduate of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University (PhD 2021, MPhil 2020, MA 2011). She also holds an MA in communication and MS in learning technologies and media systems. Her research and teaching interests reside at the intersection of performance and politics, with an emphasis on the politics of representation, materiality of visuality, aesthetics of everyday life, minoritarian memory and trauma studies, collective movements and new/digital media ecologies, and transnational queer feminist praxis. Prior to joining Princeton, she served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.