26/10/2023 - As shown through the eyes of a teenage boy, Sepideh Farsi's animated film shows both the horrors and kindness that wartime brings

It’s September 1980, and a group of barely pubescent teenage boys play football in front of the Abadan oil refinery in Iran, then one of the world’s largest. They taunt and jeer at their goalkeeper, who is distracted by missiles raining down on the refinery, when boom — it goes up in a sublime sheet of flames behind them. That goalkeeper is Omid, the 14-year-old protagonist of Sepideh Farsi’s first animated feature, The Siren [+see also:
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Many of the director’s live action features — among them 2014’s Red Rose [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and 2019’s I Will Cross Tomorrow — delve into tensions of cultural and sociopolitical exchange in the context of migration and revolution. Continuing under that thematic umbrella, Farsi, who was a teenager when the Iran-Iraq War broke out, portrays a spectrum of diverse characters facing hardships during wartime.

When Abadan is bombarded by missiles at the start of the eight-year conflict, Omid’s mother and two younger siblings leave the city while he decides to stay with his elderly grandfather. But what is a child to do during wartime? With a story that can be described as something of a historical fairytale, the film eventually settles on Omid’s grandiose fantasy. He dreams of following in the footsteps of his late sailor father by traversing the Shatt al-Arab (a river along the Iran–Iraq border that flows into the Persian Gulf) in a lenj, a traditional Iranian wooden boat, taking along as many people as possible to escape the city.

When Omid witnesses the departure of his older brother, Abed, to the front lines, he quickly convinces himself that he too must head to battle. However, the brass-necked teen is quickly humbled when he witnesses an old man shot on the battlefield and his delivery driver friend, Farshid, is injured during an air raid. He is rescued by a girl named Pari, with whom Omid strikes up a sweet but underdeveloped romance, and finds a more suitable way to contribute to the war effort by taking care of Farshid’s clients, providing them food and companionship.

Farsi rewardingly introduces a selection of unexpected characters as a positive influence in Omid’s life, including Pari’s mother Elaheh (a fictionalized version of the famed Iranian singer), two Armenian Apostolic priests who generously open their house of worship, a kooky engineer who agrees to repair the dilapidated lenj, and a portly Greek photographer who helps Omid find a captain.

It’s obvious that art director Zaven Najjar is a skilled animator, but the style is arguably unfit for a film that begs for more emotional nuance. Its overly clean and flat 2D-animation style feels too sleek and defamiliarized from its subject matter, with facial expressions being devoid of movement other than forlorn teardrops and facial twitches. The visuals remain frustrating for a film in which dialogue and music are bursting with expression - Erik Truffaz’s jazz-fusion score with Southern Iranian classical influences won Best Original Music for a Feature Film at Annecy. A counter-example is Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee [+see also:
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film profile], which is less visually polished but has more character.

Najjar’s style works best when allowed to infuse emotion into the fairytale that Farsi offers. In her faithful visual recreation of the city, the beautiful lapis-and-turquoise mosaics of a central Abadan mosque are just doors away from the austerely white Armenian church. The modest use of colour without variations in shade expands over the course of the film to include rich sunset gradients and a wider chromatic selection. At the start of the film, the Abadan refinery blazes vividly in shades of tangerine and marigold, looming ominously behind the young footballers. By the end, the sky is painted in nuances that range from blue to red, while plum and aquamarine wash in a wine-dark sea.

Farsi’s "visual coding", as she called the technique in the post-screening Q&A, is a successful anchor for the film’s semiotically derived historical premise. Half-ripped posters of Ayatollah Khomeini line the roads, exhibiting Iran’s twice conflict-stricken state barely a year post-revolution. A dog growls at Omid only to reveal his bloodied stump of a hind leg as he limps away. Omid eagerly trains his fighting rooster, Shir Khan, only to witness the animal violently peck another rooster to death, awakening in the young Iranian a sense of awareness of mortality.

Although the animation style holds back the feature from reaching its true heights, Farsi’s first animated effort is a stirring attempt that admirably tackles the human dimension of one of the longest international wars in contemporary global history.