In this project, I wanted to approach non-Iranians to take action about Iran’s revolution. 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, A strange topic to me because I never knew what could be assumed 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, 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. It took me a long to get over my fears of having a camera in the streets with this experiment because I was so traumatized from not being able to have a camera in the streets of Iran. It was always too dangerous to be because I could get caught by the authorities or have my camera 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.

I chose a sentimental feeling Iranian song in 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 film’s atmosphere with that decision. The questions are not supposed to direct the audience and were chosen based on Iran’s dramatic situations. 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.