Documentary
A strange orchestra of bodies, light, reflections and shadows throught shots of brief action and surprising appearances of humans and animals. A small film rejecting hierarchy while finding connectedness of love and affection in the small gestures of life.


Herself

In the summer of 1900, the first film camera was purchased by Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar for Iran, and immediately the first Iranian moving images were captured by this camera. These images, in an obsessive manner, have embodied the mesmerized gaze of people. In the span of 79 years since the purchase of this camera, Iran has undergone two revolutions and two coups, and throughout all these moments, the camera has been present as the recorder of people's mesmerized gazes. These mesmerized gazes are in a way as if they are the ones looking at us, not the other way around. It seems like these gazes are trying to convey something, but what? No one knows. Now, we gaze at those who have gazed at us from a distant time.

Two layers of mesh overlap on the left. One rotates over the course of a day, its speed shifting gradually. On the right, a single mesh remains still. Digital interference is continuously superimposed onto the physical rotation. Where no rotation occurs, motion persists through digital interference alone. Under different conditions, the two images arrive at similar shimmering forms. The sound drifts with the sky. Tremolo. Pulse.

Made with virtually no budget during COVID-19 quarantine in 2020, IRANIAN LIVES MATTER abstractly recounts the true story of what occurred in Iran during the November 2019 protests, sparked by a surprise hike in gasoline prices, which quickly spread across the entire nation and was subsequently crushed by the dictator's iron fist, resulting in the death of approximately 1500 protesters, as reported by Reuters. IRANIAN LIVES MATTER is an experimental documentary, an audio-visual endurance test that audibly takes its audience through the chaos in the streets of Iran as the brutal regime cracks down on Iranian protesters, while visually showing the hands of the dictatorship as it crosses out 1500 lives one by one to further emphasize the scale of the massacre and show to a world desensitized to news of mass killings in the Middle East what the term "1500 dead" truly means.