TheEYEfilm

In this project, I wanted to have the approach towards non-Iranians to take action about Iran’s revolution. Something that felt like a part of my identity. I had 4 minutes to play with and I ended up at 03:58 minutes. I chose to work with the idea of a normal life, Very strange topic to me because I never knew what you could assume as “normal”. So I had to show Everything that would remind a Rotterdamer of their life and is familiar to them. For instance, people walking down the street or talking to each other, or going somewhere with their child. It reminds the audience that they have this freedom of a normal life because other people fought for these rights in the past. I chose to use my camera, a sony alpha 7riii, and implement the use/faking of long lenses to heighten the sense of distance from the audience’s point of view, to capture the moving images. It took a long experiment for me to get over my fears of having a camera in the streets in this project because I was so traumatized from not being able to have a camera in the streets of Iran. It was always dangerous for being caught by the authorities or be stolen. I wanted the pictures to be beautiful and poetic, not just documentaries. Creating such things was a perfect learning point in my artistic path which I was not used to. The final result came out satisfying to me.

The missing part was the connection between the pictures and what I wanted to convey. What is normal life and Freedom to have it? On the first day of the "Is it possible to talk about power and violence without showing their depictions?" seminar, We saw a short film that gave me the connection I was looking for. The narrative and how I could work with it in an abstract way.

I chose a sentimental feeling Iranian song for the background when the audience will hear a series of questions, that they can/can not relate to, starting with do you remember? I wanted to give a dreamy, makes you feel it’s not real, feeling to the atmosphere of the film with that decision. The questions are not supposed to give a direction to the audience and were chosen out of very dramatic stories that happened in Iran. After 4 minutes of not knowing, the film leaves the audience with a few sentences honoring the people who have died fighting for freedom in Iran.