It’s a very candid piece of work. What was the context and what were your motivations for telling this story?
Scientific research exploring the self-administration of morphine in animals in the 1970s proved that when rats were offered two water bottles – one filled with water and the other with heroin – the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed and died. Every single one. In a largely forgotten and overlooked experiment, Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander hypothesized that this might be related to the setting and conditions they were kept in. In contrast to the small, solitary, metal cages of the previous experiment, he and his colleagues built ‘Rat Park’, a large housing colony 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. They were free to roam, play, and socialise, they had mental stimulation, the capacity to mate and bear offspring… And they were given the same access to drug laced water bottles. Not a single rat over-dosed. However, the human equivalent of ‘Rat Park’ can’t be built in a lab.  Contrary to many preconceptions, recovery takes a lot of time, effort, and energy and that extends to loved ones too. There is no magic wand solution or quick fix. And no guarantees. But I truly believe you can’t do it on your own. I suppose my motivation for telling this story is the idea that the opposite of addiction is not just being clean and sober, but rather connection. Authentic and meaningful human connection. And even that isn’t always enough.

How smooth or bumpy was the shooting process? Was there anything you ended up leaving out or struggled to film?
There are so many films about the dark descent into addiction, but not so many that take us into the challenging, deeply personal, and unknown world of recovery. However, I underestimated how hard this film would be to make.  There was a lot of debate about whether to include everything I shot – and whether it would be damaging to me or my partner to do so – but in the end I decided that it is what happened, so it should be part of the film. I did withhold some of the more graphic ‘cold turkey’ scenes. I wanted to document everything as honestly as possible, but the physical act of coming off the drug (the synthetic heroin substitute Subutex) did not feel like the point. Recovery can’t be reduced to ‘cold turkey’. In this way, the search for normality and stability becomes the main subject, whilst coming off Subutex is only the result. Seeing how much I have broken my partner’s trust was what I struggled with the most. Also seeing my lowest points reflected back at me made them even more painful somehow. I kept asking him if he was ok to carry on and he always said, if it can help someone else not go through what we have, then it would be worth it a million times over.

How have you found the reception whenever you’ve screened it? Did any reactions particularly stand out?
Heroin is still a taboo.On top of that, motherhood as a recovering addict is not only shrouded in stigma, but is also a medically, ethically, and psychologically complex terrain to navigate. The reception has been, generally speaking, immeasurably positive. I find that people are curious – they often have a lot of questions about it all.  

What’s your background as a filmmaker?
Since finishing Clean I’ve enrolled in an MA in directing at the National Film and Television School, so I’m doing things a bit backwards. Prior to that I’d made campaign films for NGOs and charities as well as working in broadcast.

What sorts of stories are you keen to tell going forward? Would you also like to explore fiction?
I’m currently in the midst of making my first fiction film via the BFI sharp shorts scheme. I’m also very interested in the threshold between the real and the imagined – it’s a really interesting time for hybrid filmmaking.

What’s your favourite short? 
Sergei Dvortsevoy’s In the Dark is one of my favourite shorts – for what it leaves out as much as what it includes. It’s about an old man and his cat – and there’s a Sisyphean tragedy to it all. It’s not overly expositional or overly concerned with ‘aboutness’ but rather it is a film that manages to say so much without relying on words to convey its meaning. I love Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s shorts, Peter Greenaway’s, Philip Hoffman’s, as well as avant-garde works like Peter Kubelka and Morgan Fisher that explore and play with all the permutations between image and sound, silence and absence.

What does the Festival mean to you?
It is the Cannes of short films, so it is of course an honour. I think even more so because it is such a personal film, and a topic that is so close to my heart. Therefore to have a platform like this is truly humbling.

Clean is being shown as part of the International Competition I2.

The film is a very moving account of a father’s struggle. What inspired you to tell his story?
This film is inspired by my own childhood when my dad was a journalist and he was imprisoned for two years.

How did you cast the film? And how did you work with the actors to re-create these subtle family dynamics?    
In this film, the female character has to work and be active, I chose an actress who is also a very capable actor and famous in Iran, she is naturally full of energy, in contrast to the male character who had been in prison for a few years, he should have been less energetic with a hard face, I had seen this actor in the movie A Man of Integrity, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, who was present at the Cannes Film Festival. To find a child actress, I auditioned a lot of child actors until I got to this little girl who had acted in TV commercial teaser. I really liked her face and she was very smart. I went to her house to play games, and between games, I would practice the movie sequences. Children should think that everything is really just a game. We had training sessions with male and female actors, but the child only practiced with the female actor and did not meet the male actor until shooting time, because I wanted them to be strangers to each other.

What’s your background as a filmmaker? What sorts of stories do you like telling?
I have two documentary films, one of which is called Finding Farideh that was the representative of Iranian cinema at the Oscars 2020. And I have four short fiction films and my previous film called The Visit was also in the Clermont festival and this will be my second time at this festival. I am interested in stories that are inspired by real society. Especially stories that are self-portraits.

What are your cinematic inspirations?
The Dardenne brothers and Abbas Kiarostami’s films.

What do you hope to work on next?
I have a short story script inspired by the recent events in Iran which is not unrelated to my previous works.

What’s your favourite short?
The first short films that attracted me were Krzysztof Kieślowski’s short films.

What does the Festival mean to you? 
Generally in my opinion, the artistic community in the world has no borders and forms a big family  and festivals are very useful  for gathering these  family members for cultural  exchange. I hope to find good connections here to produce the next film.

48 Hours is being shown as part of the International Competition I5. 

What prompted you to make a film about the issues raised by the messages left by Anathematic Anarchist? Do you plan to make other films addressing these issues?
My initial desire was to make a film about the solitude specific to digital capitalism through the example of dating apps. But when I found and read Anathematic’s suicide letter, which moved me a lot, I decided to introduce incels as a focal point. They embody for me a very dark human desolation, linked to the social atomization produced by the Internet and screens. I wanted to explore their emotions, which resonated with me in an unexpected way, because I too have often found myself terribly alone behind the screen of my mobile phone, obsessed with its illusion of connectivity and sociability. Young people – of my generation, Gen Y, but it is even worse for Gen Z – are spending less and less time with their friends, making love less, and are more depressed and anxious than ever. Personally, I am convinced that the cause of all these sad transformations is the same: digital platforms, and the virtualization and increasing automation of our existences. My second short film, HODL, deals with another very masculine virtual community, one which revolves around cryptocurrencies. In making La Mécanique des fluides, I also realized the contradictions and complexity of masculinity as a socio-cultural construction. In approaching these communities, I want to understand how they contribute to the production of a patriarchal masculinity that seems dangerous for both women and men.

How did you construct the narration, and organize the videos and virtual space excerpts?
The narrative was constructed organically as I found documents on the Internet, researched incels, dating apps, and the effects of algorithms on our subjectivity (especially Eva Illouz and bell hooks, but also Judith Duportail and many scientific articles on the manosphere). After a long process of theoretical research and field investigation, I wrote a voice-over that gave the film its first structure, but I rewrote and rearranged it based on the videos and material I gradually found on the Internet. The problem – and the advantages – of working with the Internet as an archive is that it is a process that is endlessly open to serendipity.

Do you organise any activities beyond simply showing the film, such as art exhibitions, public meetings, or online or social network debates?
The film has already been turned into a video installation for an exhibition at the Filmwinter Festival in Stuttgart, where we presented it next to a print of the complete Anathematic letter (which is not shown in its entirety in the film). There have been public meetings at festivals and other screenings, but I would really like there to be more presentations of the film in the activist feminist community, as I am very interested in what kind of debates the film might spark in those circles.

Have you considered turning La Mécanique des fluides into “spam”, proposing or integrating it into algorithms, etc.?
Given the subject matter, I was afraid of being harassed by masculinists if they discovered the film. I even considered not signing it with my own name at one point. However, it is very important to me, from a political standpoint, that the film be seen as much as possible, that the issues it addresses be discussed. Becoming viral in this sense would be comforting, as I believe the film addresses a growing misogyny that should be part of the public debate as a matter of urgency. But I still have doubts about the film’s public future. The possibility of eventually injecting it back into the same circulation circuit from which it is in a way derived, i.e. YouTube – and thus closing the loop – appeals to me as much as it scares me.

What’s your favourite short?
That’s a very difficult question… I greatly admire the theoretical and artistic production of Hito Steyerl. In France, Gabrielle Stemmer and Chloé Galibert-Laîné have made films that have inspired me a lot (Clean With Me (After Dark) and Forensickness, among others).

What does the Festival mean to you?
It is a wonderful opportunity for the short film to be seen, to engage with the audience and other filmmakers about it, to meet other artists and discover their films. The Lab program, in particular, seems amazing and it is a real honor to be part of it.

La Mécanique des fluides [The Mechanics of Fluids] is being shown as part of the Lab Competition L4. 

What was the starting point for writing the script? 
My father has an incredible memory, not just for details about events from the past, but also about the precise thoughts he had at the time of those events. For thirteen years, he kept this story to himself, and all of a sudden one day when I was having dinner with my parents he told us the story. I found it truly touching: funny and at the same time deep. I immediately got the idea of making a short film out of it.  

How did you work in the urban setting? 
The film’s geography is made up of a network of suburbs that are interconnected by highways, which make it seem like it’s easy to get from one city to the next and which destroy a natural sense of distance. I’d add too that for me it’s important that this story takes place in 2008 when many people still didn’t have smartphones and we still had to depend a lot on people we didn’t know.  

Were you more interested in talking about the question of losing one’s bearings or a parent’s  relationship to responsibility?  
The two themes go together. The father in the film feels lost in his efforts to deal with his teenage daughter, and he literally loses his way. In the story, his anxiety as a parent is actually the direct cause for him being in an unfamiliar area. On the surface, we realize that being lost is not really such a tragedy… 

Why were you interested in the father-daughter relationship? Are you thinking about making other films on the subject?
The answer is personal: the story i I Once Was Lost is true. When I was a teenager I behaved like the girl named Emma in the film. As I grew up, I became aware of my mistakes. Simultaneously, I developed a sense of gratitude towards my father and a sense of curiosity about his experience as a father and as a human being. Currently I am most definitely drawn to telling stories that have a direct link to my personal life.

What’s your favourite short? 
I saw Adam Davidson’s The Lunch Date when I started studying film and I remember being struck by how tight the story was, told in only ten minutes. Seeing it again now, I realize the film has a combination of comedy and depth, and a fairytale aspect that I like a lot. 

What does the Festival mean to you?  
The Festival takes place in the same city where My Night at Maud is set. Other than that, for a long time my goal has been to become a director of photography, so this is a chance for me to think hard about how far I could go with the idea of being a director.  

I Once Was Lost is being shown as part of the National Competition F3. 

How familiar are you with the hospital as a workplace? Why did you set the film there?
In 2016, I started working part-time at the bottom of the hospital hierarchy as a hospital porter – a person who moves patients and vital supplies between departments. Prior to this, hospitals were an unknown world for me. It was surprising to see how hierarchical a hospital is, and to experience first-hand how it feels to be at the bottom of this ladder. I was also fascinated by how, as a porter, you are not necessarily in the middle of the drama that unfolds in the hospital, but still observe all the interesting things that happen in between. The profession is also exciting because a porter moves between all social positions in a hospital, and also between life and death. Outside of your job as a porter, you live such separate lives, but the unique thing about a hospital is that all social classes meet. I have learned a lot from this job and my experiences from the hospital corridors are the background for the film Portør.

Who or what inspired you the character of Mai Linn?
With my film, I wanted to reflect on the common need we have to be seen. A porter sees everything that’s going on in a hospital, but nobody sees them. I wanted to tell the story about the most invisible of the already invisible porters. Someone who mostly speaks through her expressions. Through Mai Linn, we meet someone on the outside, who wants to be included. At the same time, her invisibility and observational skills are her superpowers.

Tell us more about your cinematography. How did you highlight Mai Linn’s inner life?
I wanted the camera gaze to find Mai Linn at the beginning of the film. From that point, the cinematography changes between seeing Mai Linn in the world, and her way of seeing it. I also wanted to use sound to highlight her rich inner life, and to show her sense of humor and imagination through this subjective soundscape.

The film has hints of humour. What sorts of genres and stories are you interested in as a filmmaker?
As a filmmaker I want to depict people we hardly ever see in today’s fictional landscape. To create more inclusive and interesting stories, we need to depict environments that are overlooked and forgotten in our everyday life. I want to share stories from the ecosystems we are surrounded by, but hardly ever notice. You don’t need a formal education to become a porter and these types of jobs are now disappearing. And because of this, workplaces with a lot of diversity are also decreasing. In a time where we all live in our own echo chambers, both virtually and physically, I believe that more than ever we need stories where invisible people become visible. Humor is an important element in my films. I use humor to create contrast to a rather serious topic. There is also automatically a lot of humor in depicting the relationships between diverse characters, characters who don’t normally meet. Their differences create misunderstanding, conflicts, cultural and generational clashes.

Is this a world you’re particularly familiar with? If not, what sort of research did you do?
I have worked as a porter for many years, so it is a profession and an environment I am very familiar with. I have felt the invisibility that characterises service professions like this, and which characterizes unskilled professions in general. As a homage to my colleagues, who also play the characters in the film, I wanted to tell the stories of a group of invisible people doing an important job most of us take for granted.

What’s your favourite short?
My favourite short is To Open, to See by Camilla Figenschou.

What does the Festival mean to you?
It means a lot to me that the film is being shown at such an important festival. Perhaps this confirms that I have touched upon a universal topic with this film. This project is about a profession and a group of people who rarely get seen and noticed, so it is touching that the film reaches more people.

Portør is being shown as part of the International Competition I12. 

Was Go Fishboy’s conception starting point an idea or a picture, such as a drawing?
The seed for the story came from writing games we did at school. Two of our team members, Sebastian and Zhen, came up with the idea of a boy, who is a fish and whose dad is a sushi-chef. We brought many other ideas to the table, but we all loved this particular one and found that it could become a great story.  We did lots of brainstorming and talked about our personal experiences and feelings of similar conflicts in our lives. This moment in pre-production was crucial for the story and team dynamics. It brought us closer together and helped us build a very strong bond that got stronger with each passing month.

Why did you want to locate the action in Japan?
From the beginning we knew our story would need to happen in the real world, and more specifically Japan, given the sushi aspect and the importance of family traditions and legacy. For this reason, and given that none of us is Japanese, we did a lot of research and consulting to be sure to be respectful with Japanese culture. However, we also wanted to create a story that would be universal even more given the fact that we are all from completely different countries and cultures.

Were you more interested in the parent-child separation issue or the escape into an imaginary world?
We intend to give the audience the possibility of multiple interpretations. However, there are some main themes that we tried to make clear throughout the story: acceptance, identity, family tradition and the conflict between a parent and their child. For us, Uotaro is not escaping to an imaginary world, but is finally able to set free and become his true self. He struggles internally as he explores his identity and gains confidence to hear his own voice and separate himself from the Uotaro his father wants him to be. From the father’s viewpoint, he sees his son acting weirder than usual, even though he tries to connect with him, there’s this ocean between them, as if they came from different worlds. He is trying to train his son the way his own father did with him, and his grandfather with his father before that. But it seems Uotaro is not fully engaged with taking over the family legacy, and frustration is mixed with confusion. Like a parent of any teenager, Takeshi is a curious observer of the changes his kid is going through, the growing up process that cannot be stopped, the moment when parents come to the realisation that their kid’s life is not theirs, and they have to let go. A detail we brought into the character design is the fact that Uotaro is carrying squarish glasses that evoke his father’s design, as if he is forced/forces himself to see the world though Takeshi’s eyes. However, as he jumps into the water and becomes his true self, he loses his glasses. He can now see through his own eyes.

What made you choose your animation technique and how did you share technical work?
The whole process was very collaborative, we would all participate in the different aspects of the pipeline during the first few months throughout the pre-production process and first part of production. Afterwards, we shared our interests in concentrating on specific tasks, so we distributed them accordingly. However, we would still go back and forth between us, receiving and giving feedback. Lan dedicated most of her time to the color script and animation, Chia-Yu was the lead for layout, backgrounds and coloring, Zhen did the final version for the character designs and concentrated in animation, Sebastian would be the lead for sound design, communicating also with our composer, and doing animation, Andrey would be the lead for compositing, lead in 3D animation and working also in 2D animation, Denise would be handling production since the beginning, animating and giving support to the different leads.

What’s your favourite short?
That’s a very hard question to answer, since we are six co-directors. During the script writing phase however, we talked about short films and shared many. One of the short films that caught almost everyone’s attention was Easter Eggs, directed by Nicolas Keppens. Another short that we all loved was Je sors acheter des cigarettes, directed by Osman Cerfon. Regarding the artistic aspect, we were deeply inspired by Masaaki Yuasa’s work and Crayon Shin-chan.

What does the Festival mean to you?
It is the first time for all of us to participate in this Festival. We all think that it is a beautiful milestone in our journey. Being selected means a lot since we know the importance of the Festival, and having the chance of sharing our film 8 times makes us extremely happy. We are eager to learn about the jury’s and public’s opinion and various interpretations. We hope everyone enjoys Go Fishboy as much as we did making it. We are also excited to have the chance to connect, exchange experiences and share ideas with new people. We thank Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival for providing us with this great opportunity.

 Go Fishboy is being shown as part of the National Competition F5.

What made you choose to locate this encounter in the middle of an environment in a process of destruction?
I’m interested in dystopia as a genre because above all I feel it’s very entertaining and liberating: it all starts at the end of what we know.

What did you find interesting in the relationship to the sea? Do you have further projects on this theme?
I like the sea because it seems to be alive. I guess it’s the effect of seeing something in constant movement. This quality seemed precious to me in a world where there are no humans or animals left: in such a desolate and static landscape, the sea will go on coming and going forever. I don’t plan another project with this theme, but it was something present in my thesis short film Trompita y la Migración de Liebres. This also took place on a beach and had a tragic ending in the water.

What are the influences that have inspired you?
Well, at an aesthetic level, El After del Mundo was influenced by Tartakovsky’s Primal series. It was a very important reference when it came to incline this dystopian and somewhat tragic story towards a more joyful place on a visual level. In the Country of Last Things, Paul Auster’s novel, was also a more indirect influence within the dystopian universe. Buenos Aires, my province, was an inspiration too. The aesthetics of the characters, especially Fluor, have to do with the people I see nearby. The coastal images, the water park, the souvenirs… They are also a collage of very local images.

id you have any particular technical difficulty?
I think everything was a great challenge. I learned a lot on a technical level. The truth is that it was a luxury to be able to count on such an amazing team both in Argentina and in France with Autour de Minuit. But if I had to point out a particularly difficult moment, it would be the animatic. I struggled and suffered, but I was able to learn from the process.

How did you work on the music?
When thinking about the aesthetics of music, Juana Molina was always among our main references. I was interested in the quality of her voice and the loops she uses in her songs went very well with the idea of time suspended and trapped in the eternal repetition that this end of the world we were creating had. When we started the production and we had to define the final music for the project, it occurred to me to write to her. Juana really liked the project and joined the team. She designed 3 songs that the characters always listen to from their cell phones.

What’s your favourite short?
Well, the truth is that I’m always on the lookout for short film production, especially animation. So my list of favorites is permanently updated. We could say that the oldest one is Belly by Julia Pott. Easter Eggs by Nicolas Keppens, released in 2020, was a short film that I found wonderful. Finally, Carne de Dios, by Argentine director Patricio Plaza, was one of the best things I saw this year.

What does the Festival mean to you?
I live in Argentina, so I haven’t had the pleasure of going to previous editions. But I know it’s the most important short film festival! So I’m looking forward to attend this year and draw more conclusions.

El After del Mundo is being shown as part of the National Competition F6.  

Who or what inspired the characters of the two friends? What did you want to explore through their relationship?
The characters of the two friends in the film are based on real characters. So, the story is based on true events, with some fictitious interventions. The very idea for this film was initiated by these characters. Before I started to write the script, I was talking to Ermal, the producer of the film, who is also my friend. I was telling him stories from my childhood in the post-war period. I told him how we, as children of that time, manifested love and friendship. I told him about one of my closest friends and how different we were from each other. I told him how powerful she seemed to me. I admired her, and her stories of her personal life became a part of my life – which was less interesting than hers. I think it’s very noticeable that one of the characters in this film is based on my personal story. I couldn’t hide that. Even the girls from the cast told me that when they read the script. Through their relationship, I wanted to put in discussion some phenomena of our behaviour as individuals and as society. How we as individuals lose our authenticity because of fear of not fitting in. Over time, we as characters fade and unify to what we are because it is less interesting to others, or it may even seem that we are lost or we have lost our emotional and intellectual connections. Maybe we fear to be ourselves or alone with our world, we might lose connection with others and end up lonely. That’s why we alienate ourselves to fit in. And I think this phenomenon starts during childhood. On the other hand, children are powerful tools to carry things forward, because they are also good imitators and these things can be violence, love, friendship, trauma, etc.

Can you tell us about the shooting location? Some scenes are shot in what looks like disused or abandoned urban spaces. What’s the background of this?  
The film was shot in some urban parts of Prishtina which still resemble the beginning of the 2000s. The abandoned places in the film are the only entertainment that the city of Prishtina offered us as children in that post-war time. Those places were used for secret dates, games, love, fights, etc. And I want to emphasize something that is also visible in film. The whole city was filled with writings on the wall and graffiti about aggression, hate, nationalism from Serbs. It was crazy how long we lived with those messages until Prishtina started to rebuild. At that time these places gave us a feeling towards the unknown and some kind of fear, but they were also exciting and made our everyday life more challenging – something that we as children wanted to achieve. We felt more independent, powerful, rebellious. So, what characterized Prishtina at that time and even nowadays characterizes it, are the abandoned public and private spaces.

How did you cast the two girls?
For the characters of Prishtinë, 2002, we held an audition and the moment I saw the girls I decided that I would take them for these roles.

What is your background as a filmmaker? What sorts of stories do you like to tell? 
The film Prishtinë, 2002 is my first film after graduating from the film academy in Prishtina. Before this film I worked as a video journalist. I produced multimedia stories and documentaries with a focus on human rights. I am focused on stories of unique characters, usually characters who have difficulties as individuals to be accepted and understood in society as well as non-conventional characters.

What’s your favourite short? 
I have many favourite short films. One that I saw a few years ago and stuck in my mind is Whale Valley directed by Isanda Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson. A very touching, down-to-earth story.

What does the Festival mean to you? 
A a young director, being selected at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival was very good news to end this year with, considering that it is one of my favourite festivals. I’ve never been before, but from what I’ve heard and seen online, it has a pretty big audience and very good short films. It means a lot to me that I will be able to communicate through film with all that audience, and all movie lovers. I will learn a lot from feedback and also from other participants. I believe that I will also be inspired for my next projects.

Prishtinë, 2002 is being shown as part of the International Competition I11. 

After Massacre, you’ve made Des jeunes filles enterrent leur vie which is more of a comedy. What was the starting point for this film?
Actually, and bizarrely, I never thought I’d write a comedy more than anything else. Humor almost comes by itself, without my intending it, or else it comes through the curious way I have of looking at the ritual of “bachelorette parties”, which is the starting point for the film. When I began writing, I was terrified of going to those kinds of things that were happening around me, that were supposedly sounding the death knell of a “young girl’s” life but that also had an element of freedom, beauty and festivity. Bachelorette parties are both sisterly events and a sort of farewell to sisterhood as you go on to embrace marital life. All of those things you leave behind, which are implicit in the event, spurred me to write a melancholy story where you can fully feel what it means to “bury” your maiden life in order to be able to examine it. 

With its somewhat antiquated codes, a bachelorette party is an excellent starting point for writing a comedy. Is that why you chose the subject? 
As I said above, my reasons were more about fascination and revulsion. But later, the comedy came pretty quickly because after all it’s a very codified ritual, it’s very performative. You play at being happy, and being princesses… I preferred to look at the ritual through the eyes of a depressed person who’s turned off by love and is totally incapable of pretending to be happy, who simply can’t fake it. And through her eyes, that out-of-syncness produces comedy.  

The film also talks about living together as a couple, breakups, societal norms… Did you discuss those topics with the actresses during filming?
Yes, I talked about love and relationships a lot with the actresses as well as with crew members before filming. Like the characters in the film, we were a group of young people (mostly young women) at an age that interested me: the moment when your first romances are clearly behind you and when life has already provided you with a certain number of more or less painful romantic experiences so you can feel a little lost about those issues. I was pretty floored when I realized that the people around me were all lost, nobody had a “good answer”, regardless of whether they had chosen the most normative route or the most experimental. And yet, renunciation was out of the question for me. Actually, I think the film talks about taking risks in love (the risk of falling in love again, of long-term commitment or of leaving someone) despite the uncertainties of the future. 

How did you go about selecting the actresses? 
I worked with the casting director, Kenza Barrah, as I did on my first short film. We tried to bring together a group that was as diverse as possible, with different energies, and Kenza had a really great sense for the actresses. We worked on the casting at the same time as my ideas about the characters crystallized. When I met the actresses and began working with them during rehearsals, I was able to draw out the energies that were still fuzzy in the script so that each actress had her own “score” on set. 

What’s your favourite short? 
I don’t know whether I have a favorite short, but a couple of years ago I was very struck by Camille Degeye’s  Journey Through a Body. It’s a film I think about often for the strength of its construction. . 

This is your second selection at the Festival, afterMassacre, in 2020. Congratulations!What does the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival mean to you?
Yes, I’m very lucky to have my latest film selected at the Festival. For Massacre, it was very important, very impressive (the size of the audience…). I’m very happy to be back. I can’t wait to spend some time here and see lots of movies! 

Des jeunes filles enterrent leur vie [Bachelorette Party] is being shown as part of the National Competition F12.   

I have read that Åsnelandet part of a trilogy. Can you tell about your inspirations and the story behind this trilogy?
When I started working with the project, I noticed that it contained too many aspects and material for only one film. It was a way to challenge myself to repeat things, but from a different perspective each time. The challenge was to really tackle a subject of something important and make it easy to understand. This is an idea that I am so interested in and that is so complex. I want to dedicate my life to getting to know this subject but on the other hand, I don’t want to repeat myself. A trilogy is a way of achieving this while keeping the core of the idea and making each film better than the last one. My films search to unfold those subtle details and complex expressions portrayed with a dash of humor, directing the spectator’s attention towards the situations rather than pinpointing them.

Your film deals with racism and microaggressions. Why is it important to show these situations in film today?
I met racism very early in my life. I noticed it was directed towards others, mostly people from Afghanistan when I lived in Iran. Then, when I came to Sweden as a refugee, racism was directed at me. So it was always a part of my everyday life. Racism is equally dangerous to those who make it and the ones being exposed. It affects people’s choices and possibilities and destroys the vitality of society. Sometimes, it can also be really boring to talk and read about these subjects. It’s like “Yes, we know…” and that’s because it’s so internalized. When I got the chance to tell the world what I wanted I really could not do anything else than to try serve in film, maybe just one person will see and understand. What we see on film is dramatic racism. I wanted to show everyday racism, an internalized racism. I hadn’t seen that on film before, but I had seen other subjects treated gently on film. These are also subjects that are difficult to grasp. It becomes so big, but it’s not big, it’s in our everyday life and in us everywhere and around us. That should be eternalized on film. To me, film is an essential tool that aims towards an increased knowledge and social change in the world. Therefore, the choices we make when portraying our stories are of outmost importance.

You play the character of Isallola and you wrote the script as well. Does being an actor help in terms of character development?
Not as much as you want to, hahaha! The actor always wants the screentime for her character and the writer wants to tell the story. They do not always go well together and then of course, we have the director in the mix. It can get really complicated. At the same time, as I am acting I must not forget to tell this and that to the camera guy. It was a real struggle but really useful because it forces me to keep developing and seeing the process from different perspectives simultaneously.

What’s your favourite short? 
Majorité opprimée by Éléonore Pourriat. I saw it many years ago, before I became aware about structures, and I was blown away. The film was so easy and fun despite having to deal with an important issue.

What does the Festival mean to you? 
Clermont is an important place and I love everything that is important. Film is nothing without its audience and Clermont is the bridge. Short film is a cool media and I see more of it in our future, that’s what Clermont means to me. A place for all of us in the world to share and to be. It’s very unique.

Åsnelandet is being shown as part of the International Competition I3.