Below is an interview between Détective Animé and Parissa (Two souls living in the same body) on the how and why I decided to work on this idea.
Un regard sur l'animation iranienne contemporaine
Program 1
program 2
May 2014, Montreal
Détective Animé: Hello Parissa!
Nice to have you with us here on your own blog! Could you tell me a bit about
yourself?
I’m a Montréal based artist, making animation films and videos. I was
born in Tehran, Iran, where I lived for 25 years. That’s where I started my studies in Stage and Design at the Cinema
and Theatre School of Tehran Art University. I later moved to Montreal in 2005
to study film animation at Concordia University.
Détective Animé: Tell us about your idea. How did you come up with the idea of an
Iranian animation program?
I’m a big fan
of film festivals and I’m always very
keen to see programs from other countries especially those who are less known.
Also what I always check on the festival lists, out of curiosity, is the name
of Iran as country of production. For reasons that are still unclear to me
there are not so many Iranian animations presented in Canadian animation
festivals. So I thought somebody had to do that. It was in 2010.
The idea was formed as I started talking
to colleagues about it. I knew I wanted it to be focused on a very specific
time span and subject. For this program, I knew I didn’t want to present something like Iranian animation from the beginning to the present. I really like
to see how filmmakers are working in other countries in our time. How they talk
about their ideas and what they are talking about in their work. Last year, I
attended a retrospective of Japanese animations from Tokyo University, which
was brought to Montréal by Masaki
Okuda. I somehow felt that often we talk about very similar themes but
depending on where we live and work we set these themes in different contexts
and situations. We also tend to narrate our ideas in completely different ways.
Détective Animé: Why did you
choose a time span of ten years?
I’m myself very
interested in what is going on around the world in animation filmmaking. How
animators make films under different circumstances and within different production
standards. At the same time, the generation who has been involved in the
Iranian animation filmmaking in the last ten years has passed through a very
specific period of Iranian history. We have experienced a revolution and few
years of war. At the same time we have taken enough distance from both of these
important events and we are now in a position to look at all that we went
through from a different perspective.
Détective Animé: Why did you focus your selection to the films produced in Iran
and not the animation films by Iranian cineastes produced outside of Iran?
What was important to me was to narrow
this study and to focus as much as I could to a specific period of time and
place. My goal was to show how animation filmmakers work and create inside Iran
in their specific context and within their limits .
Détective Animé: How did you
approach cineastes?
I asked artists and filmmakers I knew back
in Iran, to suggest me a list of independent animation filmmakers. I also made
a vast search on the Internet. I went through the list of animation festivals
inside and outside Iran to look for the films. I made a long list and I started
contacting filmmakers when I was in Tehran in 2012 and 2013. I met a lot of
these filmmakers in person, and had the opportunity to talk more in detail
about their films and the situation they are working in. It’s so different when you meet someone in person rather than exchanging
some lines in an email asking them to send you their work. It gave me a chance
to have a better idea of the reality of animation filmmakers there.
During one of my trips I received a
message from Kanoon's international affair section. Kanoon is an institute for
cultural development of children and young adults. Indeed the first seeds of
animation filmmaking in Iran have been planted in this institute. The cinema
section of Kanoon is still one of the important producers of short animations
in Iran. They showed interest in joining the project. Again what I noticed with Kanoon was that despite their
regular distribution in Europe they still don’t have that
much exchange with Canada. That’s how we
decided to add some Kanoon productions to these programs.
Détective Animé: Why did you
think of Cinémathèque Québécoise as the venue?
Cinémathèuque Québécoise is a prestigious institute for the cinephiles and
professionals in film, video and new media. Animation is one of their
specialties as an archive and as a cinema; the Cinematheque screens animations
programs on a regular basis and they also organize the international animation
festival Les sommets du cinema d’animation every year. I couldn’t think of a
better place for this program. I proposed this idea to Marco de Blois and he
gave me carte-blanche and a lot of good suggestions.
Détective Animé: What are the themes and techniques of the films presented in
these two programs?
I tried to choose films within different
techniques. For this selection my focus was to find animations that fit into
the context of short-film animation (I excluded television series or
commissioned works). What is also called Festival-style
animation. I also tried to consider different techniques but still most of
the selected films are 2D animations. One theme that is very present in the
films of the last ten years is Resistance and War. There is also an effort to
approach traditional rituals, stories and characters that are about to fade or
do not exist anymore in our contemporary life in Iran.
I would like to thank:
My filmmaker friend Minou Jan Mohammadi who helped me in the very beginning of this project.
She was living in Toronto at the time and did a big effort in finding and
suggesting different possible venues. She was the one who broke the ice for me!
This program owes a lot to the ambitious
mind of Elaheh Goudarzi, a great animator
and filmmaker working in Tehran. She brought up the idea of collaborating with
Kanoon and she made this job possible.
Gita Mohseni,
the dear lady in charge of international section of Kanoon who did her best to
make this collaboration happen
Merci
à:
Éléonore
Goldberg
Jean-Christophe
Leblond for editing and translating the materials
Delaram
Karkheiran
Saeed
Zarei
Maryam
Khalilzadeh
All the filmmakers who contributed to this
program!
And of
course un grand Merci à Marco de Blois who said: “YES! GO!”
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