IQRA’ is READ Film Screening and Discussion with the Filmmaker
2014-2015 Religion & Politics Film Series
The third film and discussion in the series.
Tuesday
4:30–6:30PM
Women’s Building Formal Lounge
Washington University in St. Louis
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
The 2014-2015 Religion and Politics Film Series brings together four documentaries that draw our attention to the many roles that religion and technology play in shaping categories of identity and metrics of exclusion in public life and private practice. Although approaching a wide range of subject matter, each film exposes the subtle but powerful influences that technologies exert on our bodies, minds, and imaginations. In each of these films, race, religion, and nation emerge as contested spaces for defining community and otherness, belonging and exclusion, insider and outsider—categories in which the boundaries of religion and politics often collapse. The filmmaker will be present to discuss their work and answer questions immediately following each screening.
IQRA’ is READ (2014) by Maryam Kashani is the third film presented in the Religion and Politics Film Series. This film documents the community of Zaytuna College, and their relationships with text, both sacred and worldly. The film is a portrait of teachers, students, staff, and former students in locations throughout the United States, but primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. The trailer features recited text from the Qur’an, the poem “Personal” by Tony Hoagland, Imam Nawawi’s Collection of Forty Hadith, a poem by Oscar Wilde and more.
Maryam Kashani is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Kashani earned her Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. She earned her M.F.A. in film/video from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and double-majored in film and interdisciplinary field studies as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. “My primary focus as a filmmaker is an exploration of physical landscape as it relates to political and economic histories, social expression, music, and personal events. My work explores the idea of place as both a location of and an impetus towards social action and manifestations of identity. In the translation of reality to representation, I hope to elicit a space of possibility and change.”
Dinner will be provided immediately following this event. Please RSVP to rap@wustl.edu or (314) 935-9345 to help with our food service.
IQRA’ is READ (2014) by Maryam Kashani is the third film presented in the Religion and Politics Film Series. This film documents the community of Zaytuna College, and their relationships with text, both sacred and worldly. The film is a portrait of teachers, students, staff, and former students in locations throughout the United States, but primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. The trailer features recited text from the Qur’an, the poem “Personal” by Tony Hoagland, Imam Nawawi’s Collection of Forty Hadith, a poem by Oscar Wilde and more.
