Short Film
Visual Researcher · Documentary Filmmaker · Photographer
Mehdi Hosseini
Mehdi Hosseini is an Iranian visual researcher and documentary filmmaker whose work links long-form field ethnography with critical visual sociology and open-access scholarly publishing. His projects examine self-imposed stigma, bodily vulnerability, public health crises, and collective sacred rituals in contemporary Iran.
This site brings together his Trilogy of Liminality: three short documentaries, Sema, This is Not a Story and Harm, each with a companion research monograph of the same title. Alongside them sits Silent War, an earlier photo book on the effect of sanctions on the people of Iran. Each project took between five and eight years of research and fieldwork.
All films and monographs are free and open access under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, with registered DOIs and permanent copies on Zenodo (CERN) and the Internet Archive.
1. Sema (27 min)
Director & Researcher: Mehdi Hosseini
Format: Short Documentary
Type: Visual Ethnography
Duration: 27 min
Location: Iran
Year: 2025
Research Monograph (Open Access Companion Book):
Read Monograph / Download PDF: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23282859
Read Online (Flip-book): https://archive.org/details/sema-visual-ethnography-mehdi-hosseini
Monograph Page: https://www.mehdi-hosseini.com/new2/books/
This is Not a Story (15 min)
Director & Researcher: Mehdi Hosseini
Format: Short Documentary
Type: Visual Sociology
Duration: 15 min
Location: Iran
Year: 2025
Research Monograph (Open Access Companion Book):
Read Monograph / Download PDF: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23283349
Read Online (Flip-book): https://archive.org/details/this-is-not-a-story-mehdi-hosseini
Monograph Page: https://www.mehdi-hosseini.com/new2/books/
Harm (9 min)
Director & Researcher: Mehdi Hosseini
Format: Short Documentary
Type: Visual Sociology
Duration: 9 min
Location: Iran
Year: 2025
Research Monograph (Open Access Companion Book):
Read Monograph / Download PDF: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23291249
Read Online (Flip-book): https://archive.org/details/harm-visual-sociology-mehdi-hosseini
Monograph Page: https://www.mehdi-hosseini.com/new2/books/
Short Documentary · 2025
Sema
سما
Sema, or Zikr-e Qiyam, the standing remembrance, is the ritual of the Qadiri dervishes: the sound of the daf and drum, the human voice, and bodies moving in rhythm until, for the dervish, nothing remains in the world but God. Drawn from years of fieldwork among the Qadiri Order of Solaei-Dolab in Iranian Kurdistan, this visual ethnography looks at the ceremony as faith, art and community at once. It is the companion film to the open-access monograph Sema.
Sema
Trailer · Sema
Sema
سما
A short trailer for Sema, Mehdi Hosseini’s visual ethnography of the standing zikr of the Qadiri dervishes. The full film follows a ritual made of music, voice and rhythmic movement, and the gathering of the community that performs it.
This is not A story
Short Documentary · 2025
This is Not a Story
This is Not a Story spends time with people living with HIV in Iran, where the virus can change the nature of every relationship and discrimination often follows. Grounded in five years of research and photography in Tehran, around harm-reduction drop-in centers and Positive Clubs, it is a quiet work of visual sociology about vulnerability, marginality and the ethics of the frame. The project was supported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the film is the companion to the open-access monograph of the same name.
Harm
Short Documentary · 2025
Harm
Harm grows out of more than eight years spent in addiction hangouts and camps, alongside people who live with addiction, some of them since birth. It looks at the shared language of tattoos, dreams and fantasy, at the conflict and self-harm these places breed, and at what drug use leaves on the body. Seeing addiction as a disease shaped by many forces, it is a work of visual sociology on social vulnerability at the margins of southern Tehran.
Plangchall Camp
Exhibition Film · Sculpture & Photography
Palangchal
A portrait of painter Farideh Sanatgar, known on the mountain as “Mother Farideh”, born in 1947 and climbing the slopes above Tehran for some sixty years. On one rainy ascent a stone caught her eye because it looked like a human face, and she carried it home. Inspired by Rumi, she began painting faces, figures and landscapes onto the stones she found. The film follows her from the winter trail to the Palangchal mountain refuge and back to her painting table, and was made for the exhibition of her painted stones alongside Mehdi Hosseini’s photographs.