Mahsa Abbasi

An experimental 16-minute film based on a personal experience of lethargy. The monotonous and tedious life of a human being. There is an effort to move forward, but no dramatic events occur. The matter is not about suspense or revealing the plot. The focus is on sharing this lethargy and time with the audience. Part of the film belongs to the experiences of the audience, and what they construct in their minds and imagination.

Dance Guide for Defiant Souls is built from the filmmaker’s personal archive of everyday audio‑visual fragments—materials gathered from her home, family, workplace, and the alleyways of Tehran during the Mahsa revolution and the wider period of state violence and U.S.–Iran conflict. Created as an act of survival, the film offers an iconographic space rather than a memoir: a sensory field where the artist’s inner world is rendered through atmosphere rather than explanation, inviting viewers to feel her experience instead of being told it. Its deliberately experimental, archival, and amateur form mirrors the conditions of its making, with rawness and fragmentation central to the truth it seeks to reveal.