Salam Cinema in collaboration with Institut français de Suède presents:

The Soloists (2021, 8 min.)

In a small village bound by absurd rules, three singing sisters and their loyal dog rehearse for the Annual Autumn Festival — until an unexpected disruption threatens to silence them. Marjane Satrapi lends her voice to Ava in this GOBELINS animation-school short, a playful fable about women who refuse to stop singing.

Persepolis (2007, 96 min.)
Based on Satrapi's own graphic memoir, Persepolis follows young Marji growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq — a fierce, funny, sneaker-wearing girl who watches her world narrow overnight. Sent abroad for safety, she wrestles with exile, identity, and the impossibility of ever fully belonging to one place. Told in stark black-and-white animation, it became the first film by a woman ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Marjane Satrapi gave Iranian women a mirror we hadn't been offered before — one that held rebellion and tenderness, chador and rock music, homeland and exile, all at once, without asking us to resolve the contradiction. For many of us in the diaspora, Marji was the first version of ourselves we saw reflected back with humor instead of pity, and complexity instead of caricature (the irony!). She insisted that an Iranian woman could be furious and funny, move between devout households and punk cassettes, be homesick and unwilling to go quietly. That insistence changed how we were seen — and how we allowed ourselves to be seen. We open this retrospective with her voice, quite literally, in The Soloists: a small, stubborn song before the larger one.

This event is the first part of a larger retrospective. For more information about tickets and scheduling, please visit @salamcinemafilmfest on Instagram.