Listen! Something Still Hanging from the Tree
- Armaghan Fakhraeirad
- Department of Music, School of Arts & Sciences
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Student Creative Production Grant
Listen! Something Still Hanging from the Tree is an experimental film that moves between public mourning drums and private healing rituals in southern Iran. Co-created by Armaghan Fakhraeirad and the visual artist Sara Abbasnejad, the film focuses on zār healing practices as a women-centered, intimate ritual world where music mediates healing, sociality, and expression. The project will be one of two connected episodes culminating in a 60-minute experimental ethnographic film that examines how the afterlives of slavery and racialized difference shape gendered forms of ritual sound, authority, and survival. Built from field recordings, photography, and drawn reconstructions, the film encourages listening for women’s agency, care, and histories that persist even when rarely recorded.