Director Seemab Gul’s short movie Mulāqāt, both presented at the Orizzonti selection of the 2021 Biennale Cinema and the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, is a story about the Middle Eastern reality of perpetration of the patriarchal supremacy on women, their bodies and their social worth, intersecting the new relational dynamics established by the Internet world and every consequence of that. Zara lives in a society whose stability is based on women’s virtues, where the things they are wearing are reflective of their character. A society where womanhood is inevitably provocative, satanic, and where every single act of rebellion – from speaking up to wearing a scarf differently from the norm – is publicly punished. But she also lives in a society stepping into the Western influence and its technologies, trends and social interactions, and welcoming an uncontrollable number of inputs without really worrying about the fertility of its own soil. Here is exactly where the cultural and semantic clash happens between what, on one side, is experienced as a normal way of freedom and expression, and on the other, becomes the cause of social shame and dishonour.

The protagonist, recording herself while dancing for fun, is not acting too differently from the majority of her peers belonging to, for example, the global community of a social media such as TikTok. In the same way, she is not differentiating from the nowadays young couples’ communicative practices, by living a new relationship with Omar consisting of chats and videocalls, and sharing with him her dance. Nevertheless, the video gains a whole different significance under the male gaze, escaping Zara’s control – it becomes sexual, provocative, and dirty, moving away from the original entertainment intent and consequently becoming potentially dangerous. This new meaning conferment symbolizes the violent perpetration of the patriarchal hold on Zara, who is doubly tied to her boyfriend’s manipulation: on one side, Omar asks her to get less dressed for him, while also asking her to cover more in public, and on the other, he ignores her requests of deleting the video and not meeting in reality, therefore keeping a control weapon and a possibility of revenge if she was not to meet his demands.

In a context where Zara is denied any kind of solidarity, even from female figures, and where emancipation is paid by a high price in terms of public dignity and decency loss, she will have to decide whether to submit to others’ oppression or to make justice to her principles by freeing herself from control, probably causing a sandstorm.

Chiara Bardella