The voice note

A filmmaker spends two years recording voices of Iranian women to keep them from being forgotten Have you ever listened to something for so long that you start hearing it in complete silence? In a Tehran being emptied by war, a woman returns to the music school where she has spent two years recording women learning to sing. Before leaving the city, she has one task: leave a hard drive in the school safe. Through storytelling and live sound, projected moving images and archival material, The Voice Note grows from artistic research into altered forms of presence and return, especially within geographies and political conditions where the “after” of one rupture is often already the “before” of the next. Personal, familial and imagined voices move through the work, appearing in altered forms across sound, writing, breath, archive or object. What does the void around a voice that was there only seconds ago sound like? How does a voice try to come back after being suppressed, erased, lost or forgotten? * Bios * Bahar Ara \[she/her\] is an Iranian writer, filmmaker and artistic researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice moves between moving image and writing, often working with sound,...