About Love on a Small Island (Gap-e Asheghi)

About Love on a Small Island is a film that explores polygamous love, marriage, and sexuality as everyday experiences rather than revolutionary acts. This is an important framing as it locates these themes in the experiences of a family of three Sunni Muslims living on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz (Figure 1). Qeshm is inhabited by Sunni Muslims, a population that is subjected to high levels of discrimination by Iran’s Shi’a theocracy, not only on the island but also on the mainland. Yet working from the daily experiences in the small village on this island, the film does not situate the question of love as a revolutionary one within the context of the religious proscriptions against the idea of romantic love and relationships before marriage. Rather, it posits love as a lived experience, which encompasses both the resistance to and negotiations with the religious proscriptions (see Abu‐Lughod 1986); moreover, love is located in domesticity and labor relations. The film won the award for Best Student Film at The Society for Visual Anthropology’s Film & Media Festival in 2019. It also won Best Student Short Film at the 2020 International Documentary Film Festival Vienna.