Washing the Eyes

Silent Witnesses

In early flickering frames, we glimpse expeditions from a century ago: explorers with hand-cranked cameras capturing distant lands and peoples. These grainy scenes were once presented as exotic curiosities. Beneath that colonial gaze, we sense lives unfolding, memories are preserved in gestures and faces, even if their voices were silenced. Caravans cross deserts, rituals flicker by firelight, and villages stir at dawn. The past speaks, waiting for us to listen. Re-watching these moments becomes a quiet act of counter-history: we wash away the dust of old biases to reclaim the humanity those early lenses overlooked.

Here, identity is fluid, reshaped with each cut and angle. Today’s artists invite us to remember and dream, to surrender old ways of seeing and look again with open hearts. They conjure dreamscapes where ancient gods guide young travellers across turbulent seas, and layer ancestral songs with electronic beats to imagine future cities.

Through memories of exile and visions of tomorrow, our gaze is cleansed. We emerge seeing the world — and each other — anew, our vision refreshed by the waters of stories and truth. This film programme brings together a selection of experimental and documentary filmmakers who examine how personal and political histories shape our relationship to place, memory, and each other.

Komitas (1988) by Don Askarian (1949-2018) crafts a poetic, non-linear tribute to composer Komitas and the victims of the Armenian genocide. Through haunting imagery and sacred music, the film explores memory as a form of resistance, transforming personal trauma into collective remembrance. Rather than offering a traditional biography, it becomes a visual requiem that preserves a silenced history and ensures the voices of the lost are not forgotten.

The short film programme Washing the Eyes: Silent Witnesses presents films that trace a movement from confrontation to reflection, asking how we document, survive, and make meaning in the aftermath of rupture and search for belonging. Collectively, this programme constructs a counter-history and offers new ways of imagining belonging and futurity.

They do not settle for depicting loss or nostalgia; instead, they transform sorrow into strength, and absence into possibility.

The special screening begins with Mona Hatoum’s Eyes Skinned from 1988, a stark exploration of violence and displacement. It continues with titles by Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Nazlı Dinçel, Aziz Hazara and Mariam Ghani, each offering intimate perspectives on exile, memory, and the politics of image-making. The programme culminates with a live performance of a new interdisciplinary work by artist Nazanin Noori AS FOR THE QUESTION OF INSINCERITY, AN APPLAUSE FOR THOSE IN THE SEATS, premiering at the Eye Filmmuseum. Noori combines a video poem and sound composition in a lecture performance that examines how applause — a gesture of approval — can act as a mechanism of control.

This evening begins with early films Hassanlou Cup: The Tale of the One Who Asks (1966) and Therefore Hangs a Tale (1973). We then dive into the long-suppressed and only recently restored 1976 masterpiece Chess of the Wind, a haunting, genre-defying portrait of power, inheritance, and loss in a decaying aristocratic household. It will be the first time Mohammad Reza Aslani will be present for an in-person Q&A in Europe.

(...) I hear the footsteps of longing,
And the methodical footsteps of blood in the veins,
The pulsing of the dawn of the pigeons’ well,
The beating of the heart of Friday night,
The flowing of carnations through thoughts,
The pure neighing of truth from afar.
I can hear the sound of the blowing of matter,
And the sound of the shoe of faith in the alley of excitement.
And the sound of rainfall on the wet eyelids of love,
On the sad music of adolescence,
On the song of pomegranate orchards.
And the sound of the shattering of the bottle of joy at night,
The tearing of the paper of beauty,
And the wind filling and emptying the cup of nostalgia.
I am near to the start of the Earth. (...)

The Footsteps of Water, Sohrab Sepehri (1964)