Unfinished Film, which moves between retrospection and imagination, text and moving image, is made in a form of meta-cinema and also an attempt to rematerialize cinema and cinematic apparatus. During a research trip to Tehran, the artist and his collaborator revisited the “street of cinemas” burned during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They treat pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema and cinema venues as a lens through which to analyze geopolitics and oil politics. Writings, archives, moving images, film footage, and sound are interspersed in a narrative structure of truth and fiction that reveals the “silent” manipulation of history and the state of Iranian society in the post-revolutionary period. The entanglement between war, desire and materials points to a man-made apocalyptic “Paradise Lost”, while asking the viewer at what level the radical revolution continues to radiate historically into the present.

Script co-writers: DAI Xiyun and HU Wei