The   Un-zipped Lips of Iranian Women in Ava Maria Safai’s ZIP

Kelly Doyle

Kelly Doyle Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Keywords: horror, zip, zipper, Iranian Revolution, women's rights

Abstract

Ava Maria Safai’s short horror film ZIP (2023), was green-lit for production by the Crazy8s Film Society out of hundreds of submissions, and for good reason. ZIP is a disturbing coming of age story about a girl on the cusp of her 16th birthday whose dream it is to sing an original song in her highschool talent show. However, her father has other plans, and she wakes on her birthday to find that her mouth has been replaced with a zipper she cannot open. Set in 1979 in Canada but during a pivotal year in Iranian history, ZIP is an effective condemnation of human rights violations against Iranian women, sparked by the murder of 16-year old Mahsa Amini for ostensibly removing her hijab.

Author Biography

Kelly Doyle, Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Kelly Doyle is a member of the International Gothic Association, the Popular Culture Association of the South, and The Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is an advisory board member, reviewer, author, and lead copyeditor for KPU’s official film studies publication, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration. Her specializations include contemporary horror film and feminist film theory with a special interest in zombie cinema as it intersects with posthumanism, critical animal studies, and gender studies. She currently teaches ENGL 4350: The Evolution of the Zombie in Film at KPU, and has been interviewed about zombies on CBC Daybreak South, Shaw TV Okanagan, and in various local newspapers. Her research interests include gender and posthumanism in horror, with particular attention to the ways in which horror films subvert and call into question the anthropocentric figure of the human within specific critical frameworks. She has published a number of critical reviews of gothic/horror texts; most recently, “Feminist Overtones at the Vancouver Horror Show Film Festival”. She has presented papers on horror film at numerous national and international conferences and published two recent book chapters that theorize notions of human and American exceptionalism, racism, speciesism, and sexism in zombie film and television.