Director: Nilram Ranjbar
Running time: 2mins
Film festivals are expensive – and so they often struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees often posing as the only dependable source of revenue that many festivals have access to, that can make granting waivers difficult.
Stories told by artists working on a shoe-string budget, or who are hit by censorship, or subjected to international sanctions, still need a platform, though. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a seventh season.
Over this most recent run of matinees, IFL will be showcasing work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free and easy communication of their artistic or political visions.
The second film in our free-to-view programme is Immigrant, by Iranian student filmmaker Nilram Ranjbar. A short-but-sweet series of visual metaphors about the emotional attachments we form to the landscape and culture around us, it is a fitting follow-up to last week’s Cats by Danilo Stanimirović.
Adopting a gorgeous visual style, Ranjbar’s animation sees the audience carried through various formative moments of a young woman’s life with a visual metaphor involving seeds growing from the earth of her home. Clutching a handful of soil, winds see a seed tumble from the soil and germinate into warm memories of play and learning – before fading as she returns to the present reality. As she stands with a suitcase, waiting to leave, the soil falls from her hand; but the memories do not simply disappear. Instead, they continue to be blown about around her, perhaps representing the inner tumult of someone left with no choice but to separate themselves from the place they once called home.
In a moment of extreme uncertainty in Iran, in which regime crackdowns and US aggression place many citizens between a rock and a hard place, there will be a great many people now faced with this reality. Ranjbar deserves a great deal of credit for her depiction of the emotionally fraught decision ahead of them – though speculatively, it seems likely that others also deserve credit that is not forthcoming. Even student-produced, super-short animation is extremely labour intensive – and the fact that Immigrant has delivered something with such polish and fluency suggests there might well have been a larger team than is named at the film’s conclusion.
Either way, however many people are behind this film, it is one IFL is proud to present to our international audience.
The film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 31st of January, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. Viewers will also be invited to rate the film out of five, to help determine the winner of this Saturday Matinees season.
As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE26 to access the film.
Stay tuned for our final film next week!