Filmmaker and Iranian activist Sepideh Farsi’s new animated feature, about a 14-year-old boy’s resistance to war and a revolution stolen by clerics, opens the 73rd Berlinale on February 16.
Before she became an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Sepideh Farsi was, and still is, an Iranian activist. In 1981, at age 16, Farsi spent a year in jail for being what she calls a “double dissident,” wishing to topple the monarchy and yet not wanting to see the clerics take power either. After her release, Farsi was blacklisted and banned from colleges and universities in Iran.
She had two options: stay in Iran without any of her civil rights or leave the country.
“And the situation was worse in the early 80s than what it is now in terms of censorship,” explains Farsi, who was born in Iran’s capital, Tehran. “And, of course, the Iran-Iraq War was going on as well and the war was used to crush the dissidents. Many of my friends got killed.”
After accidentally being issued a passport, Farsi made a run for it, escaping Iran at age 18, finding a new home in Paris, France. It’s been roughly 40 years since Farsi left Iran and 35 years since the Iran-Iraq War ended. Now a filmmaker for over 30 years in the industry, Farsi is releasing her incredibly personal 2D animated feature, telling the story of the war through the eyes of a teenager almost the same age as she was when one of the bloodiest wars since World War II changed her country forever.
The Siren will open the 73rd Berlinale (also known as the International Berlin Film Festival) as part of the Panorama Lineup on Thursday, February 16. The festival itself runs through Sunday, February 26.
“We wanted to show the impact of a war, that’s over yet not long over, on a boy who was almost a child, and yet not anymore,” says Farsi. “I was a teenager just like Omid when the war broke out and it was something that, in scale, could be compared to the Vietnam War. It was a huge event, and it affected the whole Middle East. We wanted that to come through within the film’s romance, humor, and tragedy and with its teenage character who many people could identify with.”
The film begins in the year 1980 in Abadan, Iran, one of the martyred cities of the war. The residents have been defending against a siege by the Iraqis and a 14-year-old Omid, who chose to stay in the city with his grandfather as he waits for his older brother to come back from the frontline, now struggles with realizing what his life could have been like had the revolution not been stolen by the clerics. But how can you resist in a war without taking up arms? When Omid finds an abandoned ship in Abadan’s harbor, he believes it’s the answer to saving the people he cares for.
For the film’s script, Farsi collaborated with Javad Djava, who has been a persona non grata in Iran as well.
“In all of my films, I'm always interested in this combination of history with the individual’s story and their interpretation of those events,” says Farsi. “War is a terrible thing, no matter where it happens and to whom it happens. It destroys lives and we are witnessing it again and again.”
Farsi began work on The Siren back in 2009, the same year she was denied entry back into her own country because she produced the documentary, Tehran Bedoune Mojavez (Tehran Without Permission). The 83-minute film showed life in Farsi’s crowded home city, Tehran, facing international sanctions over its nuclear ambitions while experiencing civil unrest. It was shot entirely with a Nokia camera phone because of government restrictions regarding film production.
“I was just about to attend the Locarno film festival when the authorities found out, through an interview, that I was preparing that film, and I was interrogated when I was in Iran in early 2009,” explains Farsi. “I was finishing another film, which is called The House Under the Water, and I was called into the Ministry of Intelligence and interrogated about both of my films. When you’re a dissident, they are always watching, and I had a feeling it was going to be my last trip to Iran.”
Farsi attended Locarno at the same time as The Iranian Green Movement (or Green Wave of Iran), also referred to as the Persian Awakening or Persian Spring by western media. The Wave was a political movement that arose after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, in which protesters demanded the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office.
“There were a lot of heavy uprisings in Iran and many people got killed,” says Farsi. “So, I tried to make the festivals I attended that year ‘green,’ and tried to get as much empathy and recognition as I could for the Green Wave, and I took stances openly against the regime. After my collaborators were interrogated in Iran, I knew I could not go back. During that spring, I had the idea of making The Siren. The idea hadn’t necessarily come from these events. It was just a desire to tell the story about the war. But I couldn’t go to Abadan and, even if I could, we wouldn’t be able to film there.”
The city was completely destroyed during the Iran-Iraq War and, instead of using a soundstage and visual effects, Farsi decided to combine animation and live-action footage based on her own experience with the war and Abadan, a city her father took her to when she was a child. Farsi’s father died in Iran in 2022, and The Siren is dedicated to his memory and those of Iranians killed by war.
“I decided to put the names of people who had been killed by the regime within the film as landmarks that only I and some Iranians would notice,” says Farsi. “They're not even translated.”
She continues, “There are many of the names in the cemetery scene beyond those who were really buried there, but also on some shops and things like that. It was a silent tribute to people who have left us, who have been killed in all these years of conflict.”
Farsi’s art director on The Siren, Zaven Najjar, also shared a paternal connection to the film. Though Najjar is Parisian, his father is Iranian/Syrian, and it was one of the reasons Farsi chose him for the job when they first met in 2014.
“We met through mutual friends,” remembers Najjar. “I was finishing my short film Shell All, which takes place during Lebanon’s Civil War. A friend told me she met Sepideh at a festival and that she was looking for someone to do the design of her feature film. The project seemed so unreal and when I got to meet Sepideh myself, she started showing me pictures of the war. Both she and Javad were such larger-than-life, impactful, meaningful characters that working with them was well worth it to me.”
Some of the characters in The Siren are even designed after members of Najjar’s own family.
“There were a lot of points that connected us emotionally and Zaven’s sensitivity to the material made it much easier to collaborate and meet the goals we had for the film’s style,” says Farsi. “It was a mixture of personal decisions, historical facts, and artistic decisions with Zaven that we combined to make this film.”
Farsi describes the artistic process of creating The Siren like assembling a puzzle with missing pieces. There were vast amounts of research conducted by Farsi and her team on the makes of cars that people drove at the time, billboards in movie theaters, watches, shoe models, and more. But there were plenty of things unaccounted for that Farsi filled in with her own memories, experiences, and interpretations.
“It is kind of magical, bringing this city back to life, but it was also like doing historical archeology, putting documents together and trying to rebuild a map that does not exist of a city that has changed ever since it was destroyed,” says Farsi. “And, on top of that, it is a historical period in Iran because it's just barely two years after the revolution in 1979 and there were still things from the pre-revolutionary era. The Reza Shah era was still visible in the city but there were also all these new symbols from the war.”
Not to mention the world was transitioning from the 70s to the 80s, and the pop-culture influence was also present, even in war-time Iran.
“Abadan, because of the petrochemical plant, was a very cosmopolitan city,” notes Farsi. “You had a lot of Americans, even though a majority were still Iranians, and engineers from all over the world working there, so you had this mix of wardrobe that was both Middle Eastern and very American. George, the Greek photographer in the film, really existed. And we were feeding all these details to Zaven to inspire him to draw all these complex levels of history while still being iconic.”
The film’s art direction employs a style Najjar is becoming known for, reflecting the visuals associated with his graphically bold film Shell All. Though there is much more vibrancy and variety in The Siren’s color pallet, the minimalist 2D animation is the same, layered like cut-out figures and models in a pop-up book that move and shift as the POV changes.
“The style needed to be able to depict all these details and all these layers simultaneously and believably and in different contexts,” says Najjar. “This film is adventurous, action-packed, romantic, comedic, historical, and so we’re not just recreating something. We’re mixing history together with fiction. So, the design choice was always going to be a risk. I always kept that in mind. Plus, we follow a teenager, which is another different kind of story perspective. We wanted the audience to be able to feel all these elements, even if it’s not something they are completely conscious of.”
The backgrounds and settings are immensely detailed – from a local Abadan movie theater that had been set on fire before the revolution and included over 400 casualties, to recreating the mosque next to the Armenian church at Abadan’s city center – but the characters themselves are more minimalist in style so that Najjar could add and take away details as needed to fit with each new emotional event in the film.
“It’s a style that starts out with as few elements as possible but leaves room to add all those details that bring more life to a scene when you need it,” he explains. “That’s the way I’ve always worked. I think it comes from making illustrations.”
Being able to make these detail changes as needed came in handy, particularly with the first scene of the film, which depicts a Zar ritual. The ancient ceremony is used to cure an individual possessed by evil spirits, or “jinn.” The practice originated in Africa and still exists in southern Iran, the horn of Africa, and southern Egypt. In the film’s opening scene, a young Omid is watching in awe as an Iranian man dances beautifully to the rhythmic beating of drums in the middle of a well-decorated room.
Suddenly, the boy becomes horrified as he watches a rooster being sacrificed during the ceremony and simultaneously, he is accidentally whacked in the face by the dancer’s rod and begins to bleed alongside the bird.
“It was very important for me to open the film with this particular scene because it would open the film as a tale,” explains Farsi. “Not quite like a fairy tale, but something more linked to legend. I also wanted to link this story with a past trauma, so when we come back to the present tense of the film, the first shot we have of Omid as a teenager shows him keeping the score of a rooster fight and he has a scar on his eyebrow.”
She continues, “It was also very important for me to start with this ritual and make the viewer float in this non-precise time period of Iran, rather than just dropping them in the recognizable 1980s. I wanted them to float in this imaginary land and, all of a sudden, come down to Abadan in the 80s and start the story on an emotional level with Omid. It was a bit complicated to pull off because there was a distortion in time and space. But I think it works.”
Both Farsi and Najjar hope that The Siren will touch the hearts of people from all over the globe and open the eyes of “those who were denied a true account of this conflict.” Though Farsi believes the film cannot be experienced the same way by everyone – especially Iranians who experienced the war firsthand, or those in other countries who have only heard stories – she says that her film speaks to the universal human experience of tragedy and finding the strength to resist and rise up with hope for a better future.
She hopes this will help open up conversation for others to learn more from their Iranian neighbors about Iran’s past and how it has affected their present.
“What I would really like to happen is for people to recognize the Iran-Iraq War as one of the most terrifying wars of the past century,” says Farsi. “I want them to notice that what we're living through in Iran now is very much linked to what we see in the film.”
Both Farsi and Najjar will be attending the film’s Berlinale screening. See the full festival schedule here: https://www.berlinale.de/en/home.html.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
