Transnational Iranian Poetics of Resistance: The Green Movement and Iranian Women’s Agency in Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose (2014)

Chapter 3 , “Transnational Iranian Poetics of Resistance: The Green Movement and Iranian Women’s Agency in Sepideh Farsi’s Red Rose,” examines the role of female agency during the Green Movement of 2009 in challenging the norms surrounding Iranian femininity, and also in foregrounding connections between Iranian national and diasporic politics and the poetics of female resistance. In the first part of the chapter, I provide background information on the Iranian socio-political events portrayed in Red Rose, before exploring in depth the film’s references to Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, which invite reconfiguration of female agency more broadly. Discussion in this section particularly draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-revolutionary.” In the third section of the chapter, I turn to a consideration of the film’s key stylistic traits and textuality, which I align with the exilic condition in particular and an exilic filmic “accent,” focusing in particular on the incorporation of protest video footage and tweets to expand on another Deleuze and Guattari concept: the “minor.” The final section examines such stylistic elements and those of previous sections in relation to Farsi’s own intercultural subject position and the role of the personal within her filmmaking and politics—a motif apparent in many films directed by Iranian diasporic women filmmakers.