Ghazal Tahernia, ZāR (2019)

Nara: Hi, I'm Nara from Insomniac! I was just wondering if you could introduce yourself and your film.

Ghazal: Yeah! My name is Ghazal Tahernia. I'm a stop motion artist. And I got into Insomniac with my project Zār.

Nara: It’s such a beautiful, smooth stop motion film - but it’s in animated in felt, which is not very typical. What made you choose that material? 

Ghazal: Well, I wanted to play around with something new. I've done some projects with silicone and clay, but those materials all had their own issues. With this project, I really wanted to capture the movement of the dance that I choreographed with my friends - so the puppet had to be very light. I started learning felting off Youtube, which I picked up very quickly, and it helped a lot throughout the process because the puppet actually broke twice. But it was really easy to cut the puppet open, fix it, and then felt it back together.

When I was practicing with the material to get a sense of whether it works or not, I realized how the felt makes the body look like it has hair on it...which was along the concept I was playing with - women’s freedom and positive representation of self-image. So, I went crazy and decided the whole puppet should be made out of felt. For the hair, I actually used natural human hair to capture the look. 

Adam: You mentioned that idea of women’s freedom as represented in the film. Puppets are often used a symbol of control, but the puppet that you’ve presented in your film ends up finding a sense of freedom within that control. 

Ghazal: Yeah, I had this image of a naked lady carrying a lot of heavy stuff on her shoulder, and then it developed itself to the concept of the puppet being dragged around. I always work with puppets, it's like a stop motion thing - you always work with little characters, but I never actually knew why. 

My mom is from Southern Iran and the project is actually based on this ritual they do over there. It's very directed towards women. And it's very weird because there's no scientific proof behind it. They believe in spirit possession - that something like a ghost of some sort comes in and haunts you, then starts controlling your body and makes you ill.

In these rituals, they sit the ill person in the middle of the room and bang drums around her to see what drum beat the spirits answer to. And then based on whatever they identify that spirit to be, they feed the person who's ill with all sorts of weird stuff...like the blood of a sacrificed animal and super unscientific stuff. But the reason why it is very directed towards women was because women in those areas are very defined by being a mom or a housewife, and they become so neglected in their lives that they're drawn into these ceremonies. 

I wanted to show that the woman in my story is kind of a representation of a typical Persian woman who is not only being controlled by governments and misogyny, but also by the personal desire to go through these cult-like behaviours just to get out of being a housewife all the time or having to have a boy kid to prove their woman-ness.

Seb: You mentioned the choreography. How were you able to create such an elaborate dance and then recreate it in felt? 

Ghazal: I realized one of my best friends is a dancer and I had no idea about that. I kind of knew the key positions of the character, and I knew that it [would be] a felted puppet being dragged around by the invisible hands of a puppet maker. I knew I wanted her to start lying on the floor. And I knew that eventually I wanted her to start getting out of constantly being dragged around, like getting control finally in her own hands and trying to gain back her power by getting the mask off.

So, I marked those keys and rehearsed them with my friend a few times. It was a very interesting process because when you're a dancer, you're normally dancing with your hands and feet at the same time, whereas with a puppet it needs to be delayed by a few seconds...and it was a very interesting learning curve for her to be able to delay the leg movements by a few seconds before she fell. We did rehearsals every week for three months before I started shooting. 

Adam: Why was it important for the character to end up in the same place and for the film to have a looping quality? This is especially pronounced in the installation version of the film that I saw at OCAD.

Ghazal: For the message to work, I wanted to say that this is not something that can [easily] get fixed. There's long years of history, tradition and religion, all those combined, and it's kind of rooted in your DNA when you're born in Iran - you have to deal with it. So, I wanted to show that even though people are trying to get out of that element and try and be themselves, there are still stuff controlling the main freedom. It's kind of a sad ending.

At some point you kind of give up. So, that was my message on how I felt. But, throughout the installation, it had to be a loop because then it would start again - and I didn't want it to be one single channel with credits rolling at the end. I wanted it to feel like a presence in the room. And adding those things would just take away from it. A lot of people in the room [for the installation] were waiting for something else to happen. But then [the puppet] would get up and do the same exact dance. It was interesting.

Adam: The looping made it even more absorbing. I think I sat there for around five or six loops. 

Ghazal: Yeah, [laughing] I had somebody sleeping in that room! It was hilarious. She was like, "This is so therapeutic, I cannot leave the room." It was a great experience. You never know if what you're saying actually works until the audience sees it and has a positive response.

Seb: I think it’s very cool how the way that it’s presented in the loop, and the fact that you’re specifically tailoring the dance to the material - it all ties into this theme of being unable to break tradition.

Nara: At the beginning of the film, you sort of feel uneasy because you’re not used to felt animation. So it just looks like this furry thing lying on the ground and you can’t tell what it is. But then once it’s revealed, there’s this sense of relief. How were you able to create such a range of emotions in such a short time?

Ghazal: I felt like being at OCAD, I learned that a very good story is a short story that has an impact. I’ve worked with a lot of stories myself that are 4 minutes long, very chalky animation, and never finished [them]. So I felt like I needed something that was doable within the timeline I had. And then for that 2 minute duration, it was good that I had the reference dance. I could go and watch it, fix this action here, fix this pose here, work with the dancer to make sure everything is working. 

That 2 minutes honestly was more than enough. I was animating 2 seconds a day and it took 2 months to finish the project, and that’s excluding the concept and the material configurations and all of that. One of the other things is that when you’re working in a gallery setting, you need to have something short and quick because the audience doesn’t really have that attention span. I had so many people walking in almost at the end [of the film] and they thought that was the whole thing and so they left. People don’t usually look for more than 2 seconds at a painting, so you’ve got to grab them quickly.

I also wanted it to look very realistic, which is not something that a lot of animators go towards. Because with animation you can create a whole new set of movements and a universe that doesn’t exist, but I wanted it to match the real life so much that you can’t tell at points if it is a real person in a suit or a puppet. I feel like it was important to have that human base to the puppet. Constantly questioning “is it real or not?”

Seb: Have you showed the film to anyone from the community who has either embraced or rejected it in a dramatic way?

Ghazal: I haven’t had rejection so far, but a big part is that I haven’t shown it to [many people]. I showed it to family and friends. The main place you want to get a response from is the country of origin, which I’m hesitant to do, because I want to be able to travel back there. My puppet is naked and it’s going to create a whole set of drama for me, but it would be nice if I could one day.

It’s necessary to show what an outsider perspective of the issues are to people who are inside of it. I showed [the film] to my family members and… they don’t get it. They just don’t get it. The only question that my father had was: “why is she naked?” I guess my mom only picked the traditional mask, but nothing towards the actual message.

Adam: Does that make you feel more comforted in showing it? Like “oh, well they won’t fully get it anyway”.

Ghazal: A lot of the time with stuff like this, you’ve got to talk to people who are thinking critically. Art is not for everybody. You can pick from people’s lives, but those people who are already dealing with how to make enough money to survive don’t care enough to think what the statement of any shit is. That’s the only part that I really don’t like about it - because I’m talking about a whole bunch of people who don’t care what I’m doing to start with. They have so much other shit to deal with in their daily lives.

But I got a lot of women talking to me actually, a few of them Persian, that bounced off ideas about this concept. So it’s good to know that people are thinking about these issues, but sad to know that I can’t show it to everybody because not everybody cares. 

Seb: It’s hard to know your own flaws. One time someone was like: “oh I’m so sorry about this film.” I’m like, “what?”. They’re like: “oh that character is so clearly based on you. I’m so sorry.” And I never would have known that, but now I’m upset!

Ghazal: Yeah, I made a film when I was in first year. The main character was [based on] my mom, and I showed it to her, and she thought that it was her mom. They never see themselves in the things you create because they don’t have the perspective you have of them. I hope you were represented good.

Seb: It was okay. But I think that’s kind of the power of movies - that you always identify with the main character, never the villain.

Ghazal: Cause you never see the worst part of yourself as much as other people do.

Nara: In the audience reception to your film, do you feel that the film has been universally relatable to a lot of women or is it more so Persian women who’ve come up to you and talked about it?

Ghazal: Actually more people who talk to me are not Persian, and it was very interesting because they would see this sense of helplessness in [the character], they wouldn’t specifically connect it to any culture, [...] but a lot of people that talk to me caught the concept of there being so many limits stopping her from what she wants to do. I wanted it to have a traditional look to it, but she’s also a representation of a more modern woman.

If you talk to youth right now, they don’t give a shit about hijabs or whatever they’re forced to. They’re a lot more free. They’re thinking a lot more critically and creatively, and that’s how I felt. The biggest issue for most of the women who get out of the country is the forced uniform they have to wear, so for my character to show that she is not following that tradition anymore - she had to be naked. Which I don’t think the people of that town would relate to.

Adam: I would love to hear you speak about the sound design of the film.

Ghazal: What I did was go through a lot of Zār ceremonies, which is the name of the ceremonies, on YouTube. Asking my Mom, figuring out the drum beats. It’s very varied from Iran to Morocco, who also had that tradition. What ended up happening was that I connected myself to a few of my Persian friends who were drummers and it didn’t work out, although I thought they would know the atmosphere a lot better than anyone else. So, helplessly I posted an inquiry on Bunz Music Zone, and a few people responded. One of them wanted to make a score in exchange for animation techniques.

But what ended up happening was I met this guy, Harold Camacho, and I just explained that this is the kind of thing that I want, it has to start very slowly with almost nothing playing and then it’s going to peak up at this point, and then it falls when she falls down. I wanted a kind of contemporary look to it, but I also needed it to be very traditional, so I asked him to use only hand drums. What he did was create a lot of different textures - he was using like his nails on the drums, and he recorded with one of his friends. He sent me a sample and I tried to match it to the movement of the dancer, and once he sent me a sample I could work with, I got into animation. 

Then I finished, he did another revision, did some adjustments that he artistically would be happy with. I wanted to give him a lot of control on that because I know absolutely nothing about music, but it’s very important to have it as an element in your work, otherwise it doesn’t work. Then, I don’t know if you noticed or not, but there is some breathing happening. I recorded that with the dancer to match perfectly and have that sense of an actual presence there.

Adam: Thank you so much for chatting with us, and for making such an amazing film!