#5*Documentary and power dynamics & How To Tell A True Immigrant Story - in conversation with Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz

Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz is an award-winning, Iranian-American documentary filmmaker and educator with interests in diasporic identity, feminism, co-creative practices, and the interchange of form and content in documentary engagements. Her work aims to articulate documentary complicity in oppressive regimes while optimizing documentary power to undermine those regimes.

Aggie's first film, Inheritance (2012, 27 min), a poetic autobiography on the relationship between political and personal revolts, earned the Loni Ding Award for Social Issue Documentary at CAAMFest 2013 and the Best Short Film award at the 2015 Indie Grits Film Festival. In 2013, Bazaz was one of seven Iranian filmmakers invited by the Iran Heritage Foundation to write and direct one segment of a multi-vocal documentary about the first-ever U.S. tour of the Cylinder of Cyrus the Great.

Her most recent film, “How to Tell a True Immigrant Story” (2019, 13min) was the first-ever VR film to be programmed in the Pardi di Domani shorts competition at the Locarno International Film Festival. Aggie has been artist-in-residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Skidmore Storytellers Institute, and Interlochen Center for the Arts, and in 2016 was named a BAVC National Mediamaker Fellow. She earned a University Fellowship to pursue her M.F.A. in film and media arts from Temple University and holds a master’s degree in multicultural literature and women’s studies from the University of Georgia, where she served as a researcher for the Emmy Award-winning digital humanities project, the Civil Rights Digital Library. Aggie currently serves as Assistant Professor of filmmaking at Georgia State University and continues work on a long-term project embedded within a community of migratory families who live and work in California's Central Valley, as well as a multimedia project about family homes built around the world through remittances, Mi Casa My Home.

In today’s episode, we talk about art and activism, documentary as a way of processing and theorising our realities, how documentary and the way we tell stories can maintain power dynamics and How to Tell a True Immigrant Story, which is also the title of her last short film.

See Aggie’s work:

Website: https://aggiebazaz.com/

Connect with Aggie:

• Instagram @agg_star
• Facebook @Aggie Ebrahimi

Watch it the episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxHPzAzN0Ak&t=7s

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