After a life shaped by protest, exile, and loss, an Iranian woman Shaereh turns to Sufi whirling as an act of remembrance and resistance, transforming her personal healing into a collective vision of women’s freedom.
SHAEREH is a poetic short film that follows the inner journey of an Iranian woman whose life has been shaped by political trauma, loss, and exile. Through the sacred ritual of Sufi whirling, she transforms grief into motion and silence into voice.
The film unfolds as a visual prayer. Pomegranates split open. Rocks crumble like her freedom. Sand rises like rebirth. As Shaereh turns at the center of a circle of women, layers fall and breath returns.
Inspired by the Mevlevi Sufi tradition, SHAEREH explores freedom not as escape, but as an inward awakening shared collectively. It is a meditation on reclaiming the body, dissolving inherited silence, and remembering that liberation begins within.
In the end, the whirl becomes more than a ritual. It becomes a language for every woman who has ever had to lose something in order to return to herself.
Elif Koyutürk Hazen is a documentary director and cinematographer working in hybrid nonfiction. She began her career as a camera operator filming extreme sports and adventure stories around the world, a background that shaped a visual style grounded in presence, physicality, and intimacy with place.
She is the director and cinematographer of Guardians of Anatolia, a 20-minute documentary short following the last nomadic Yörük communities of Türkiye, selected for the Mountainfilm Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship. She is currently developing Story of the Lost Goddess, an episodic documentary series examining goddess traditions across Anatolia, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, and is in post-production on Shaereh, a 6-minute art film centered on Iranian women’s expressions of freedom through Sama-inspired movement.
In parallel with her film work, she was selected as an artist for Cambridge University’s Sci-Art program and has exhibited work internationally in museum and gallery contexts as both a visual artist and photographer. Her practice is research-driven, visually grounded, and internationally focused.
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