THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Red like blood, blue like the waves of the sea, black like ashes. Mermaidanimated film by Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, may retrace the memory of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), when the director was a teenager, this work tells us about all the conflicts.
The animation allows here to fill in the gaps of a story, which was deformed in its time by propaganda images. Sepideh Farsi makes different points of view heard in this dreamlike work where the horror is never frontal: some prefer to die a martyr rather than survive in hospital, others refuse arms and resist in their own way.
Born in 1965, in Tehran, Sepideh Farsi lived in Iran until 1984, before leaving for France. Banned from the territory since 2009, the director has carried out archival work remotely and collected memories of inhabitants, to bring to life, in Mermaidin a beautiful documentary style, one of the martyr cities of the conflict, Abadan, in the south of the country – after its destruction, the city was rebuilt and today has a population of 200,000. Mermaid nonetheless remains a fiction.
Omid is 14 years old, with fine features and a fledgling mustache. Here he is goalkeeper during an improvised football with his friends. As he scans the balloon in the air, his attention is diverted by the trajectory of two missiles which converge on the refinery. The deafening explosion also calms the joy of the opposing team, which has just scored. End of the game and carefree afternoons.
The song of the fighting cock
First of all, it is the story of a family that is falling apart. The older brother has just left for the front, the mother decides to flee with her two young children. Omid prefers to stay by his grandfather’s side, with the silky white beard.
If he takes off his turban, the fabric is transformed into an undulating wave, summoning the memory of the father, a former captain who disappeared at sea, at the controls of a lenj, a majestic wooden ship with a tapered hull. One of them is beached in port, seriously damaged. There also remains a cherished rooster, backfiring in its saffron feathers, whom Omid trains in combat, like a substitute for the adolescent, deemed too young to defend his country.
Omid does not want this slow agony and travels the roads on an old motorcycle. Dreams go through his head, which suspend the action, to the rhythm of music hated by power – in competition at the Annecy Festival, which ended on June 17, Mermaid won the prize for best original music, composed by Erik Truffaz.
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