TIFF ‘25 Daria’s Night Flowers — Queering the Silence

Image Source: Maryam Tafakory's Website

There is power in the scenes prevalent in Iranian cinema of women taking sedatives and attempting to end their lives with the medication that has been prescribed to them. To rephrase, Maryam Tafakory sees the images of women whose agency has been taken away from them and acknowledges the quiet part in her 2025 short film Daria's Night Flowers. The scenes find themselves blended together, spoken over, and yet the truth of them stays persistent. She takes these scenes and tells us a story of persistence and queer survival. In the silenced part of Iranian society, she makes an impossible love bloom. Escape becomes a liberation of Daria’s power.

Her love for a girl who is named “Blue” is the only thing that Daria has. And Tafakory never lets us forget that fact. The color pervades the film, overlays itself as the recontextualizing element over the archival footage of the women of Iranian cinema. Blue waters, blue flowers, blue dyes find themselves piercing through the film. She fills in the gaps and colors the quiet parts of the women that these characters are meant to represent. In this, we get the portrait of an impossible intimacy — one that can only exist when it bleeds through what we are allowed to see. One that heals and kills all at once.

Sister of Nephentes to forget. Belladonna to help with the perversions created by chemical warfare in Iran, but which causes delirium, paralysis, and death in the wrong dose. These are the choices that she is given by the police, the men, and the women that agree with the men. Forget this love, or die from it. But even the anger and the violence behind this choice remains in silence. Rather than stepping into the narrative stereotypes of brutalization, Daria only quietly expresses her frustration in these choices as flowers.

But Daria’s Night Flowers reminds us that flowers, once given to you, are yours to hold and decide the fate of. In the images of women whose agency has been taken away, Tafakory finds that the choice to use the weapon of those who are attempting to silence you is a form of power. In her disappearance, Daria finds her survival.

The mythology of her story becomes one in a long train of women who quietly teach each other how to survive, and the films that Tafakory assembles together become one in a long examination of the stories left untold.