Dance Guide for Defiant Souls

Directed by Mahsa Abbasi

Dance Guide for Defiant Souls is built from the filmmaker’s personal archive of everyday audio‑visual fragments—materials gathered from her home, family, workplace, and the alleyways of Tehran during the Mahsa revolution and the wider period of state violence and U.S.–Iran conflict. Created as an act of survival, the film offers an iconographic space rather than a memoir: a sensory field where the artist’s inner world is rendered through atmosphere rather than explanation, inviting viewers to feel her experience instead of being told it. Its deliberately experimental, archival, and amateur form mirrors the conditions of its making, with rawness and fragmentation central to the truth it seeks to reveal.