2020 | Iran, Australia | Experimental

Speak the Wind

  • 7 mins
  • Director | Hoda Afshar

This film is currently not available.   

Speak the Wind (2015–2020) examines the cultural and geological manifestations of wind in the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, where these invisible currents are believed to be a source of illness. Afshar’s film, accompanied by a series of large-scale photographs, documents a local cultic practice in which a healer attempts to purge the winds possessing a patient through a ritual involving incense, music and movement that many believe was transmitted to the south of Iran from southeast Africa via the Arab slave trade. The artist illuminates the Strait of Hormuz as a contact zone where the collision of cultures has given rise to hybrid traditions.

Winds have shaped the islands off the southern coast of Iran, in the Strait of Hormuz, and over many centuries, tides have brought to these islands an ancient and complex group of people. Here, there is a commonly held belief that the wind can possess a person, and can equally be exorcised from them through an intense ceremony of dance and music.

In Speak the Wind, Iranian, Australian artist, Hoda Afshar proffers an enigmatic view of the rituals and lives that play out within the astounding landscape of these islands. As she uses photography and moving image to ensnare and parse the winds of the Strait of Hormuz, Afshar also grapples with the history of documentary photography; its beauty and its limits.

cultural geological island purge music