16 Sep Gilnaz Arzpeyma
September’s #MainArtist of the Month, Gilnaz Arzpeyma, is an experimental filmmaker whose work explores the tactile and political dimensions of identity through under-camera animation techniques. She is the winner of Main Film’s Grand Prix at the Asiate en court short film competition (Festival Accès Asie). Her cinematic practice delves into questions of representation, language, and power, offering layered and poetic reflections on how identity is shaped and challenged. Her contribution this month is a meditation on resistance to categorization, affirming identity not as product, but as possibility.
Gilnaz Arzpeyma is an experimental filmmaker of Iranian origin who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal). She uses in-camera animation techniques to explore the scope of touch as a means of contemplation and knowledge production. She is particularly interested in the adaptation and adaptability of living bodies to technology and machines. More specifically, her works deal with the ongoing influence of colonialism and technology on the experience of time and aura.
Drawing on a process-oriented approach and using both archives and personal and public memories, she structures her works around flesh, the limits of the body, and bodily expressions. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Film Animation from Concordia University. Her works have been presented in various film festivals and screening rooms around the world in the form of animations and moving images.
Filmography
- Woman, in collaboration with Arash Akhgari (2023)
- Fleeting: here and there (2021)
- Be Hold (2019)
- Cycles, in collaboration with Lisa Bounouh and Naomi Dawn-Mansfield (2019)
- Aging Narcissus (2018)
❝There have always been a thousand ways to name myself :
through gender, through desire, through skin and tongue and border.
We learn to fold ourselves into categories, taught to live in binaries: this or that, us or them.
It is an old ritual — carved into science, whispered through history,
a way to recognize the Other, to make difference legible, and controllable.
But the moment I hold too tightly to any of those names,
I become still, frozen, reduced,
I am no longer whole, but a single shard of who I am.
And yet, I am all of it : layered, shifting, uncontained.
Our identities are not fragments to be boxed and shelved,
but constellations : messy, intersecting, alive.
It is this very complexity that binds us, that moves us beyond the plastic fences of identity
toward something deeper: our shared, chaotic, human becoming.
Yet in today’s world, ruled by the cold logic of neoliberal dreams,
our rich complexities are pressed flat,
ironed smooth for easier packaging.
Corporate hands reach deep into our institutions,
from hospital beds to classrooms,
from studio floors to curatorial boards.
And within this glossy framework,
diversity is drained of meaning,
recast as a slogan,
a checkbox,
a polished mask.
It parades difference like a trophy, grabs you, brings you to the forefront.
But never as decision-makers, truth-tellers, re-shapers of the system itself.
It never asks who holds the power, who sets the terms.
True change means turning away from sanitized inclusion, toward the raw, uncomfortable work
of redistribution.
Only then can we honor identity not as performance,
but as power.
Not as product,
but as possibility.❞
Gilnaz Arzpeyma
#MAINARTIST
Our organization is an artist-run center committed to supporting its community as a whole, without distinction.
Beyond the simple declarations of solidarity against racism following the events of the summer of 2020, but also against more recent racist acts and those that persist historically, it seemed essential to us to offer a place to our members so that they can express their feelings in the face of the discrimination they experience and which could be based on the color of their skin, their origins, their sexual orientation, their gender or a handicap.
We invite them to share their thoughts on this societal drama that constitutes all forms of rejection of the other.
Main Film is an artist-run center committed to supporting its community as a whole, without distinction, in the creation of independent film.
Our 35th contributing artist is Gilnaz Arzpeyma.
#MainArtist #ArtisteImportant
Because it is artists who carry both the role of representing society and making it evolve.