Sepideh Farsis about THE SIREN
“This film took us longer than the first Gulf War”
Some people are born with a passion for animation in their hearts. Others are not. Sepidah Farsi left Iran in 1984 to study mathematics in Paris. After her interest in visual arts was piqued, she started making films in the early 1990s. But it was not until 2023 that she made her first animated film. THE SIREN tells of 15-year-old Omid, who rescues a group of Iranian civilians from the Iraqi attacks on the Abadan oil metropolis in 1980 during the first Gulf War. When that war broke out, Farsi was exactly the same age as Omid in THE SIREN. Wouldn’t it be obvious then to weave a bunch of personal war memories into Omid’s story?
Sepideh Farsi: Of course! I am showing the absurdity of war through the eyes of a teenager. At this age – no longer a child, but not yet an adult – you are fresh and fragile, but so many possibilities are awaiting you and you have the chance to make crucial choices. My scriptwriter Javad Djavahery and I chose a boy as protagonist because boys are more subject to the pressure of taking up arms and going to the war front, but we gave him the almost same-aged Pari as alter ego. After all, both are affected by the war. Such a duo also opens up possibilities for a modest romance.
You made us part of your childhood in wartime?
Farsi: I felt the need to talk about this war because it is such an important chapter in the history of our country, a conflict that drastically changed the Near and Middle East. At the beginning of the first Gulf War, people fought to defend their country. But from mid-1982 the decision to continue the battles was more in order to export the revolution, lock up all dissidents or crush them down. This war is a taboo subject in Iran that has almost never been dealt with, except in propaganda films. This terrible conflict was the first chapter of a series of wars in the region that are still ongoing.
Your film doesn’t shy away from the atrocities of war! How do you feel about showing THE SIREN to an audience of your main character’s age?
Farsi: 12-year-olds are confronted with violence, they see the news on TV, experience violence on social media channels or in video games, and they are not oblivious to the fact.
You used to tell your stories about Iran in documentaries (like TEHRAN WITHOUT PERMISSION, 2009) or live action films (like RED ROSE, 2014). Why did this one needed to be told in animation?
Farsi: War is a tough subject, and perhaps more bearable in the form of an animated film. THE SIREN conveys a dream of a united humanity, a utopian journey – so I needed a form that would allow me the use of a kind of magical language that could keep war at a distance: Animation! Moreover, reconstituting the 80s is much easier resorting to animation, because most of the buildings were destroyed during the war and everything that reminded us of the Shah’s era already disappeared with the revolution of 1979. Showing the Iranian society of that era would have been quite complicated. Whereas here, you can revive the atmosphere, the couleur locale of that time in a far more organic and detailed way.
That helps to show Abadan as an open, cosmopolitan community.
Farsi: That was also the case in Tehran. I went to a school with Iranian Armenians, Jews and Zoroastrians – and in Abadan the mix was even more diverse because of the oil industry and all the non-Iranian employees of the Oil Company, at least until the war began. I wanted to show the complexity of the Iranian society at that time, all the strata, with different ethnic and social groups. Iran was not just made up of religious fanatics, not then and even less now. This is a cliché, promoted by the Iranian regime and magnified by the media abroad. Of course, many people have emigrated, but religious minority communities such as Armenians or Jewish people, though smaller, are still there.
This project must have required a lot of research?
Farsi: You could say that! I did a lot of research for photos, reports and archive material. I worked with more than 100 people in a total of 10 studios in Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg and Slovakia, which was not easy. Some of our collaborators I never met in person because of the COVID pandemic, but Javad Djavahery, Zaven Naijar and composer Erik Truffaz were with me in Paris. We worked together very closely.
Zaven Naijar was responsible for the animation design.
Farsi: Zaven is a talented young graphic artist who had until now only made a short film about the civil war in Lebanon. Though born and raised in Paris, he has a deep understanding of the region, even though he had never been in Iran. His father was an Armenian from Aleppo and he has inherited many cultural elements through his family story. He knows the history of the Armenian Genocide, the exiles, the conflicts in the Middle-East, and living in diaspora through and through. In fact he quickly understood what I wanted to express: the feeling of imprisonment and siege. Therefore, we excluded certain colours from our chromatic pallet. We wanted to be close to the Persian visual culture and yet tried to avoid the clichés of orientalism.
With composer Erik Truffaz, you had another star on board.
Farsi: It was the second time I worked with Erik. He is very open as an artist and accepted to use some Persian instruments in his composition, on my demand. But the soundtrack also contains quite a few pre-existing tracks by Saeid Shanbehzaden, another musician from South-Iran, exiled in France, and we used some well-known songs from the 70s.
Truffaz’ music was awarded at the Int’l Animated Film Festival in Annecy.
Farsi: Prizes warm your heart, give you energy and encourage you to continue, and when the audience goes along with you and thanks you at the end, that means a tremendous amount. I am always obsessed with the work and the creative process itself and I don’t think about the aftermath, but it feels good to have your work recognised. THE SIREN took us more than eight years to make, longer than the first Gulf War!
Interview conducted by Uta Beth for ECFA Journal.