The Relational Mode: Farideh Fardjam’s Documentary Strategies of Migration and Intersectional Archival Activism

Interrogating the role of archives in sustaining historical erasures, this paper examines the overlooked work of Iranian filmmaker Farideh Fardjam, who documented Turkish labour migrants in the Netherlands in the early 1970s. Despite their historical significance, Fardjam’s films have faded into obscurity, reflecting broader archival silences surrounding diasporic women filmmakers of colour. Through an intersectional lens, this study explores Fardjam’s distinctive documentary strategies, emphasizing migration and displacement as both thematic and methodological concerns. Édouard Glissant’s notion of relationality sheds light on these strategies, foregrounding relation, translingualism, and opacity. Situating Fardjam’s documentary practice within the broader shifts in 1970s documentary filmmaking––marked by emerging radical film cultures and women’s cinema––it closely analyses two documentaries. Met een nieuwe naam serves as a compelling commentary on various bordering mechanisms and tactics of dissent; Met hun zegenende handen reveals the continuum of capitalist patriarchal regimes across borders, and women’s everyday resistance.