How do you pick a film for a theme?

Do we begin from subject matter, from recognizable conflicts, from what appears to “fit”? Or from form — from patterns of action, obstruction, repetition, and delay that may not announce themselves as thematic at all? A themed screening quietly asks a methodological question: whether a film belongs to a category because it depicts something, or because it organizes perception in a particular way.

In practice, the answer is never singular. One can choose a film already known, in order to guide discussion; a film avoided, in order to finally confront it; or a film whose resistance invites collective interpretation. Practical conditions intervene — availability, subtitles, the endurance of a weekday audience — yet the decision remains interpretive. Programming is already a form of criticism: the theme proposes a hypothesis, and the screening tests it in public.

Whatever the reasoning, one thing is guaranteed: you will not leave with the same film you screened. A themed screening produces interpretations faster than any individual viewing. Someone notices a gesture you missed; someone else reads a political implication you resisted; another viewer attaches the film to a historical context you had never considered. The theme does not fix meaning — it multiplies it.

While thinking about what might belong under Antagonism, I chose a film already central to my research, Bahram Beyzai’s سگ كشی Killing Mad Dogs (2001). My writing approaches the film through a different set of questions, yet the theme foregrounded another dimension I had not needed to emphasize there: the way conflict operates through procedures, encounters, and transactions rather than overt confrontation. Programming it was therefore both practical and curatorial — a chance to examine that aspect collectively and to place into the room an Iranian film that circulates far less widely than its formal rigor deserves. 

The screening, then, began from a simple question the film itself never states: what if antagonism is not merely something the narrative depicts but the condition that organizes how the film works? Completed after a decade-long prohibition on Beyzai’s filmmaking in Iran, Killing Mad Dogs unfolds through pressures exerted on a single character as she moves across offices, streets, and institutions. The conflicts — institutional against individual, gendered authority against resistant agency, appearance against disappearance — accumulate less as dramatic clashes than as a pattern of obstruction. Narrative urgency, fractured chronology, and constricted urban space together suggest a structure propelled less by plot events than by the persistence of opposition. The screening asked whether the film’s form produces antagonism, or whether antagonism makes the form perceptible in the first place.