TehranAvenue Film Festival

January 2007

TehranAvenue One-Shot Film Festival (TAFF) is a practical suggestion: To speak in a visual language that doesn't appeal to technological crutches and digital wizardry. This approach to the "image" attaches itself to simplicity. It doesn't need an editing table. The prerequisite is for the image-makers to acknowledge that image is just another form of inscription, like writing, which was once the domain of the learned. Many today have access to recording equipments, which have become the pen and paper of our world. The movie theater is no longer the only place where images circulate. As a friend put it, the number of recorded images far exceeds the number of bricks used in buildings. Another words, our world is an alloy of images. The power to make them is in the hands of a majority and yet those that dominate our visual field are made by a few advertising firms, which are control freaks, which leave nothing to accident, which only want to sell. Our public space is pockmarked by manufactured images that, much like billboards, are becoming more luminous by the day. They tell us what and how to be. We must break the monopoly of fashioned images, otherwise we wouldn't know what Saddam said and what his executioners said before the noose tightened. TAFF is a practical suggestion.