How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish is a first-person ghost ride into the suppressed world of women in Iranian pre-revolutionary popular cinema. It’s a bold and unique journey through the eyes of someone who has worked in that cinema as both director and actor. This unique story has never been told before by the people who became the subject of Iranian cameras’ intense gaze: the women. Hence, How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish is both a celebration of a troubled and much exploited “freedom” that Iranian women were offered after the Second World War and a detailed analysis of the representation and participation of them in that euphoric period of change.

Production notes

The personal, physical and political interweave via celluloid strips in London-based Iranian writer-director Mania Akbari’s How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish. Primarily an idiosyncratic survey of pre-Revolutionary cinema in Akbari’s native land, it probes the big-screen presentation of women at a time when the plight of Iranian females is in the global spotlight as never before. – –

Effectively exiled from Iran since 2011, Akbari has established herself as a vital and protean cultural force over the past two decades across multiple artistic disciplines. This is only her second solo directorial outing in ten years, following 2020’s Dear Elnaz; she collaborated on epistolary duo Life May Be (2014) and A Moon for My Father (2019) with Mark Cousins and Douglas White respectively.

Neil Young, Screen Daily

The director Mania Akbari is present in the screening on Fri, Feb 3.