Title: Blind Into the Eye
Foreign Title: Blind, ins Auge
Year: 2025
Country: Iran/Germany
Language: In Farsi, German, Kurdish and Arabic with English subtitles
Directors: Atefeh Kheirabadi , Mehrad Sepahnia
The essay film remains one of cinema’s most intricate forms, combining heterogeneous materials—text, sound, and image—into a structure that transcends conventional narrative. Blind – Into the Eye situates itself firmly within this tradition.
Using found footage, some captured in life-threatening circumstances, combined with voice-over fragments from theoretical writings and personal testimonies, the filmmakers—two Iranian artists in exile in Berlin—interrogate the political, philosophical and cultural significance of shooting demonstrators in the eye, particularly when the demonstrator wields a camera.
The film focuses on the eye as a site of struggle. It’s a target, a witness, evidence, a metaphor and a text. Deploying strategies such as repetition, split screens, temporal shifts, and deliberate ruptures until the act of seeing itself become a battlefield, and the fragility of both the image and the event it records is exposed.
In dialogue with traditions from Vertov and Marker to Hito Steyerl, Blind – Into the Eye emerges as a rigorous, unsettling exploration of politics, philosophy, vision, and the contested power of the image.
A remarkable Short Documentary!
