The Bystander by Sheyda Kashi

Iranian animation artist Sheyda Kashi makes a cut-out animation film, where politics and personal association mix and mingle.

An old man is living with a window in front of his eyes. He sees a cold, black and white, and fragile world from behind the window. But the window was not always there. While the man was a young active participant in a big revolution...

'The film is about human endeavors to join correlation circles, ' Sheyda Kashi tells Zippy Frames. 'Why do humans try to connect to circles, and what will happen to them when thrown out of the circle? They find a luciferous truth when they join these circles (like the big light in his dream in the animation). But they lose that again when the circle is destroyed, and it's the reason for the effort and need to join a circle again and again.... When he was thrown out of the circle, he could not veritably join a circle again. He is conscious of the essence of the circle now. and it's an irreversible consciousness. 

Watch The Bystander:

'The Bystander' is Inspired by Milan Kundera's 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'. Here, Kundera talked about a photo of a circle in a newspaper; people were dancing on that circle during a big street demonstration. Then he wrote about it (when he was a member of the Communist Party).

'Before reading this novel, I was thinking about the bystanders around me,' the director states. 'I was looking at our previous generation that made a big revolution in Iran, when you listen to their songs and read their text, you can understand that they were seeing a big truth and imagining a huge light at the end of the way. But in the end, they lose all they hope for, and become too alone and frustrated bystanders.'

The cut-out technique was used for the film ('they let you add more details and senses to your character's face'). Character design artist Bita Aliabadi painted the characters and faces in Photoshop; animator Shahriar Beyranvand animated them in Anime Studio.

CREDITS

Director: Sheyda Kashi | Writer: Sheyda Kashi | Animate: Shahryaar Beyranvand | Character design: Bita Aliabaadi | Background design: Saloome Gholnaraghi | Rigg: Azad Sadeghi | Music: Hamid Pakdel | Sound: Nima Javidi | Poster design: Bita Aliabaadi

The film has been selected in more than 40 international film festivals (2017 - 2019 ), and has won 7 prizes.

• The Bystander

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