Upside Down (2024) /
DANCE as a revolutionary act against the criminalization of the human body by the authoritarian Islamic Republic of Iran.
After the Authoritarian Islamic Republic Revolution in 1979, dance was one of the first art form to be banned in Iran. Many dancers left the country, and those who remained were forced into silence.
Yet a decade later, dance revived itself—this time underground, as an act of resistance and protest.
For more than forty years, the Iranian Islamic Republic regime has committed countless human rights violations to suppress its citizens, silence their voices, and paralyze their bodies.
The Upside Down is a film that declares no authority can truly control its people—because every attempt to do so ultimately leads to its own collapse.
In the Upside Down, I used a collage technique to weave together three distinct layers of footage.
The first layer consists of documentary shots extracted from social media, capturing the Women, Life, Freedom protests of 2022, along with one image from the 2009 Green Movement, where Neda Agha Soltan is shot to death by an undercover member of the Basij resistance forces—a paramilitary group organized by the IRGC.
The second layer includes a small selection of archival footage from twelve years of underground dance classes I taught in Iran.
The third layer consists of dance sequences created and filmed exclusively for this project.
By interweaving these three visual veils, I aim to deconstruct the conventional notion of dance films—often centered on joy and entertainment—and instead reveal dance as a form of resistance. The film reflects on a history of oppression inscribed on the human body in Iran and serves as a reminder of the ongoing struggles for freedom and human rights.
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CREDITS
Director, Writer, Producer, Editor Alireza Keymanesh
Production of 33Projects
Choreographer Alireza Keymanesh
Cinematographer Steven Griffin
Music Vessels to Motherland
SCREENINGS
- Work in Progress at: Procession - New Queer/Trans Global Cinema - Annual Congress, York University, Toronto, Canada—2023
- Work in Progress at: Shortcuts - Women Life Freedom Through Artists Lens, Tirgan Summer Festival, Toronto, Canada—2023
- Premiere at Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Boulder, CO, US—2024
- CURRENTS Arts & Technology Festival,, New Mexico Premiere, Santa Fé, US—2025
- Manifest Dance Film Festival, Asian Premiere, Alliance Française de Pondicherry, India—2025
- Moving Body Festival, Varna, Bulgaria—2025