SCREENING AND READING WITH NASTARAN MAKAREMI AND FARHAD BABAEI

24.02.2026 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Nastaran Makaremi

The writer, poet, and journalist Nastaran Makaremi (Fellow 2025) is one of the socially engaged representatives of contemporary Iranian fiction who, despite facing restrictions and systematic repression by the Islamic Republic over the past forty-six years, have carved out spaces of their own in a wide variety of areas—both qualitatively and quantitatively. At this event, she will show her documentary film Disconnect and present her new novel Total.

Disconnect (22 min.)
The film tells the story of a massacre—a massacre of unarmed demonstrators who took to the streets and whose protest was brutally suppressed. The narrator of the documentary is herself one of the demonstrators who took to the streets in Iran in January 2026. She vividly describes what she saw and experienced, thus bearing witness to a crime. For security reasons, no biographical details are revealed.

Farhad Babaei was born in Tehran and is the author of several novels and short stories. Due to ongoing censorship, interrogations, and harassment by the regime in Iran, Babaei was unable to publish his books there. After his work was published abroad, Babaei faced increasing threats and persecution, and in 2023 he came to Bratislava on his first ICORN fellowship and in 2024 to Berlin as part of the same program. He reads from his novella Jamming, which was published in German by dort-Verlag in 2023.

Sarah Rauchfuß, translator of Persian literature, talks to the two artists about their work and the current situation in Iran. The conversation will be interpreted consecutively by Nuschin Mameghanian-Prenzlow.

daadgalerie, Oranienstraße 161, Berlin-Kreuzberg
Free admission / Conversation in German with consecutive translation Persian/German