“We Used to be Forbidden”: the meaning of a gesture

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We Used to be Forbidden. Directed by Saba Ghasemi (United Kingdom, 2024)

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Toronto, Canada. A woman sits down for coffee and wonders what it means to be a woman. In London, another Iranian woman, facing a beer, responds from her own experience: for her, migration was directly tied to being a woman and to the limits that condition imposed in her home country. Between these two scenes, a quiet question emerges: what does it mean to inhabit one’s own body when that body is also a regulated territory? What can a gesture such as covering or uncovering one’s hair reveal about freedom? We Used to be Forbidden, directed by Saba Ghasemi, begins with these questions. The short film unfolds in a present shaped by political and religious tensions, named and confronted through the lived experiences of those who endure them. The need to make visible these forms of gender-based imposition takes shape in personal narratives and everyday choices that reveal the extent of control over the body.

Ghasemi, trained between Iran and the United Kingdom, films with the precision of someone who has lived under such rules and can recognize both the ways power operates and the ways freedom takes form. Her camera moves close to the intimacy of her subjects, accompanying them through cafés, bars, streets, and rooms where conversation becomes a space to reflect on the body, norms, and identity. The women in the film speak. They share coffee, beer, cigarettes. Their voices travel between Tehran, London, and Toronto. One of the film’s most striking features is precisely this movement across geographies, weaving a map where the hijab becomes both symbol and lived experience, an imposition but also a point of departure for thinking about identity. In this way, the political reveals itself through the intimate, in how each woman narrates, inhabits, and redefines her experience of freedom.

Within this tapestry of voices, the filmmaker lingers on the women’s uncovered hair, returning to it as a seemingly simple gesture that concentrates the tension between norm and freedom. Public space takes on a particular weight. Walking with one’s hair uncovered, entering a movie theater, choosing what to watch or how to dress emerge as actions charged with meaning. Freedom becomes a concrete, situated experience, shaped by small decisions that, in certain contexts, demand courage and carry decisive weight.

Ciclos Shorts Fest

2026

Director Biography – Saba Ghasemi

Born in Iran, 1993

B.A in cinema - Art university of Tehran

M.A. in Dramatic Literature - Art University of Tehran

M.A. in Film and TV Production - Metfilm School, University of West London

She is an independent filmmaker based in the United Kingdom.