Project Description
“Mammals”
Short Fiction/15 Minutes/ Iran/ 2022
Synopsis:
Golara, a young girl who fears becoming like her mother, visits a family therapist with her. After a while Golara and her mother change places. Golara’s mother is sitting with her grandmother in front of the therapist.
Cast:
Leyli Rashidi, Sonia Sanjari, Golara Ghofrani
Director: Mohammadreza Shirvan
Producer: Masoud Hokmabadi
Editors: Pooyan Sholevar, Mohammadreza Shirvan
Cinematographer: Masoud Amini Tirani
Sound Designer and Sound Mixer: Zohreh Ali Akbari
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Premiere Status: World Premiere
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Director’s Note:
Fear of resemblance to the original and one’s effort to control it reinforces similarity. The girl who does anything in her power to avoid becoming her mother, becomes pregnant with a child exactly as her mother did in a similar situation. Valuing originality, intensifies our fear of becoming a copy, overrides the present time, and increases anxiety. The film moves on the thin border between copy and original, real flowers and plastic ones, doll and child, archival images and narrative ones, and finally past and present. Focusing on the past eliminates the present, a phenomenon that shapes the base of our life cycle. Our effort to rebuild our childhood, our fear of a lonely future, the fear of losing the “I”, and the urge to reproduce this “I” in the “other” – for joy, loneliness, complexes, beliefs, ideologies, and Immortality- motivates human mammals to reproduce. And rejecting the present fuels this life cycle. “Mammals” depicts my anxiety about becoming like my father. My effort to deny our similarities and focus on family as a holy and original concept reinforced my similarity to him. Trying to control these similarities was like trying to hold a fish in my hands. This film is an endeavor to get closer to exist, regardless of what is original, the origin, and roots.
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Mohammadreza Shirvan
Director’s Biography:
Mohammadreza Shirvan (Born in 1999 in Mashhad, Iran) is an Iranian young film director and screenwriter. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with a Diploma in Film Directing in 2014 and is currently studying dramatic literature at Pars university of Art and Architecture in Tehran. He started his career as a filmmaker at the age of 14 and continued his career with a focus on Formalist and avant-garde films. His film, In The Morning, was shown at the Düsseldorf Film Museum in Germany and screened in China Movie Zone for a month alongside works by students from Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School, Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb), and the Palermo International film School Italy (CSC). He has participated in specialized filmmaking courses of Iran’s Young Cinema Society and is a member of FIFF‘s Talent Campus 2019. His short film script, Room won the FIFF‘s pitching in 2019. He founded the ZEDarte institute in 2021, which focuses on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema.
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