Filming/Blogging your return. What's the appeal?

I was at the Noor Film Festival in West LA a couple of weeks ago.


There were some great films, but some of the most interesting to me, given the themes of my research, were the ones that young Iranian Americans had made about their trips to Iran. Whether for the first time, or returning for another visit, none of these young film-makers had grown up in Iran or lived there for any significant expanse of time. But they felt enough of a connection to the country itself to actually dedicate their time, efforts, talents, and other resources to documenting their travels to Iran and telling the stories they had to tell about themselves and about America(ns) and Iran(ians) while doing so.

The three film-makers I am talking about also each have websites that are pretty impressive. Sam Ali Kashani's film "Tehran: Another Side" has film segments on his website, Nooshin Navidi's "Young Republic" is summarized on hers, and Justin Mashouf's "Warring Factions" has a trailer here and his blog is here.

Speaking of blogs, I've also met a number of Iranian American bloggers whose stories of return are echoed in those of Sam, Nooshin, and Justin. "Returnees" who are discovering Iran for the first time more than returning to anything they have known in the past, yet at the same time seem to feel like they're going back to a place they (at least partially) come from. It seems more and more of the second generation is seeking this journey of (self) discovery, and also wanting to engage an audience of others to participate in it with them through making a film about it, or a blog, or both. I wonder why sharing this experience with others is so important, and what the chosen media of film and blogging have to offer over others.

Getting back in the swing…

From the long silence you can tell I haven’t really got the hang of this research blog-writing business. I was starting to wonder why I got myself into this whole mess to begin with. But then I met someone who happened to see my blog. This practical stranger urged me to start up again. The realization that a real life person actually read what I was writing and wanted to know more made me finally get over myself and just keep writing.

I came to LA late last year and spent about 2 months talking to various interesting people; almost all of whom would call themselves Iranians of the ‘hyphenated’ kind (Iranian-American). Looking back, it was a couple of months of randomness and following anything that seemed at all interesting at the time. It was a time during which I taped interviews with some “prominent members” of the “Iranian-American community” in Los Angles and Orange Counties – a category of people which I had only heard stories about from outside the US and seen fringes of on my childhood family visits to Southern California. I soon noticed the same thing that many of the respondents I talked to also mentioned about LA Iranians: to a very large extent all the stories and stereotypes were true.

But on the other hand I also talked to Iranians I didn’t expect to meet; people who surprised and intrigued me. So these early months also turned out to be a time for casual discussions with new friends through water-pipe smoke on a warm night on Westwood Boulevard – with them being amused by not being able to quite place my strange accent when I spoke Farsi. It was also a time when I did a lot of wandering among, and questioning of people without really knowing exactly why, or where it was all going. But ultimately I was able to mix these bouts of confusion with the intermittent moments of clarity that drove me to come back again, this time with a refreshed and somewhat more personal interest in the research I am doing and the people it’s about.

Who are the Second Generation?... And what are they doing that’s new?

Coming back to LA from the Netherlands again, I am a bit more focused this time; focused mainly on the second generation and the new things they are doing on/with the Internet. I would call the first generation those who moved over here in adulthood – many during the early 80s on, but some earlier – and the second generation their children. Many of these kids are now in early adulthood and are doing interesting things Online, which I will get into more soon.

I know this picture of Iranian American migrant generations is quite a limited and static one. It doesn’t deal all the various in-between generations of people who came to this country as minors with their parents but have many memories of Iran, or those who have much more recently come over as young adults but end up with second generational peers. Indeed, anyone’s generational age group is difficult enough to delineate and may change with the social context, even without taking migration into account, so this is a dynamic and tricky category. But one of the things that’s most interesting to me is how and when generational gaps are experienced from the perspective of those young Iranians who are native speakers of English, call America their home, and can generally be called ‘the second generation,’ but want to ‘stay Iranian,’ however they define that. How are these young people being Iranian in different ways than their parents and what role do the use of Online media communications play in the way they do this?