Wikipedia User:Elahemassumi

 Elahe Massumi 

www.elahemassumi.net

www.roxanamovie.com

https://pro.imdb.com/name/nm4406638?ref_=nm_nv_usr_prof

Elahe Massumi is a producer and artist who has long looked unflinchingly at subjects the world has not wanted to face. Her concern has been social justice; her intention: using her work to heal the world's wounds. She explores difficult, even horrifying, subject matter, employing the beauty of color and complexity of imagery to draw the viewer into her depictions of harsh realities.

Born in Isfahan, Iran, she devoted herself to art from childhood. She spent countless hours immersing herself in the study of art, including architecture, painting, sculpture, and her other passion, the cinema.

In subsequent years Massumi hurled herself into creating video art and short films, traveling from one dangerous environment to another, even risking her life to produce works that were not documentaries, but representations of the world's harrowing situations. She worked with the men, women and children whose lives she portrayed, gaining sufficient trust so they would cooperate with her filming. To accomplish this she has had to be willing to bear not only the physical risk, but the emotional pain of being a witness.

Her first short, the multi-media installation Obliteration (l994), about female genital mutilation (FGM), surprised film curators since at that time the subject was barely known in the West. The graphic images provoked an unbearable degree of discomfort in audience, but did not prevent the work’s inclusion in several museums exhibitions and screenings. Another example of her earlier work about abuse, violation and profanation of a young body, A Kiss is not a Kiss (2001), also leaves the viewer speechless. The images and subject matter are powerful enough to hold the audience without the support of words. Without narration, we are transfixed by the black eyes of the girl that seem to follow us even after the projection is finished.

This painstakingly edited video is not a documentary about child prostitution, a theme that recently became a subject of television reality shows. Nor does it speak about sexual desire -- a paramount topic for feminist theory – or even about sexuality. There is a sensual quality to the edited imagery and its saturated colors, but the work is not about eroticism, desire or passion. In the bedroom, there is only submission and humiliation, pain and nausea. At many moments the images transmit a puzzling conjunction of realism and fantasy. It is the artist’s gaze and the conscious orchestration of images that bring us to this outer frontier of the modern world, where cruelty and the realities of survival are collapsed together.

Outside of the framework of exploitation of the female body, in 2002 Massumi produced Bitter Moon, a hybrid documentary on another taboo subject: Roma survivors of the Holocaust narrate the ordeals of their ethnic group, seized by the Nazis, sent to concentration camps, often subjected to torture and in many cases rapidly exterminated.

Massumi’s filmography includes 15 short films, all shown in festivals and museums. In each of them, she touches on an aspect of what is known as Human Rights.

'Roxana' is Massumi’s first full-length feature film: a maturation of the long-established themes of her previous work, such as female oppression or atrocities against women and children. It was a substantial undertaking for a visual artist and independent filmmaker to master the complexities of producing a feature film. The project has been evolving for more than six years, interrupted in 2015 by creation of the short work titled Patriarchal.