Culture

RFL/RE – Videos shared on social media recently have demonstrated the “shocking levels of abuse” women in Iran face from morality police and pro-government “thugs” seeking to enforce the country’s strict dress code, Amnesty International says. “Iran’s forced hijab laws are not only deeply degrading and discriminatory, they are also being used to justify violent assaults on women and girls …

Al-Monitor – “Which of these faces is the real me as an Iranian woman?” That is the question the Berlin-based artist Mona Hakimi-Schueler posed more than a decade ago with a series of self-portraits depicting her in 20 different outfits ranging from a sundress to a chador. The paintings were inspired by debates in Germany over whether female teachers should be allowed to wear headscarves in classrooms. “I used to …

PayvandNews – An Iranian team from University of Science and Technology has gained a citation award at The 2019 International Architecture at Zero competition in the US.  Students of ‘the School of Architecture and Environmental Design’ of the Iranian university claimed third place by winning the Citation Award along with three other teams from the US and one from Poland (see …

PayvandNews – Samanoo festival, a joyous occasion where people cook Samanoo – a traditional Iranian sweet paste made entirely from mashed germinated wheat – was celebrated in Daraq, North Khorasan Province, on Thursday March 28, 2019. Some 60 participants took part in the cooking festival. Samanoo, prepared in advance of arrival of Persian New Year Norooz, is one of the components of …

Guradian – The photographer Gohar Dashti was born in 1980 in Ahvaz, a city in south-west Iran, near the border with Iraq. For the first 10 years of her life, her home was a battlefield in the brutal war between the neighbouring states. She spent many childhood nights in an air-raid shelter and she looked on as the place that was all …

Radiofarda – Signatures of stone masons have been discovered in a 2500-year-old site in southern Iran, the state-run Iran Labor News Agency (ILNA) cited a prominent archeologist on February 25.

VOA – The first Iranian-American woman to win an Oscar, Rayka Zehtabchi, says she wants to build on Sunday’s triumph of her documentary about menstruation by producing several films with Iran-related themes.

CHRI – A concert by the popular Persian pop band Hoorosh was canceled by judicial order an hour before show time on February 20, 2019, in the city of Firouzeh, northeastern Iran, after a powerful local ayatollah pressured the authorities.

Al-Monitor – Movies about terrorism and crime raked in awards this year at the Fajr International Film Festival, the oldest cinema festival in Iran.

PayvandNews – On Monday, Meybod celebrated becoming a world city for Zilou, a traditional type of floor covering commonly woven across the central Iranian city and its outskirts.