TACENDA — (Latin) meaning: “things that should be passed over in silence or not made public” — is a film essay at the intersection of montage, experimental cinema, and printmaking.

Built through rapid editing, TACENDA uses fragmentation and montage as a way of questioning how we see, remember, and understand the world through images. Through multiple layers, the film establishes a dialogue with Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, reflecting on genocide, colonialism, language, abstraction, and the relationship between the image, truth, and history—all in relation to filmmaking as material.

TACENDA draws attention to the shared terminology of cinema and the arms industry—from the mechanics of early hand-cranked cameras to the persistence of phrases such as “shooting” film—revealing linguistic traces of violence embedded within image-making itself.

The film also delves into broader reflections on how language is used as a tool of oppression, and how power structures shape the conditions of what can be spoken, seen, and remembered.

One of the film’s points of departure is a poem in Persian that is itself a reformulation of pain from a Latin verse by Virgil’s Aeneid, and which can be loosely translated as: “A wound lives silently within the breast.” From this starting point, TACENDA approaches language as a site of excavation.

In the film, I use a recording of my own childhood voice, made when I was five years old in Iran, learning the English alphabet for the first time. Decades later, encountering Swedish as a new language, I was struck by the fact that the Swedish word for “pain” (ont) is identical in form to the Greek ont (“being”). This coincidence reimagines ontology—not as the study of being, but as the study of pain.

Through this framework, TACENDA inhabits an oscillation between ont (Greek) and ont (Swedish), dwelling in a space where the study of being and the study of pain converge.