18 Feb An interview with Saeid Mohammadi, director of “The Metamorph”
BIO
Saeed Mohammadi is a versatile creative professional with over 10 years of experience in directing, photography, and editing. He began his career in Tehran, Iran, before relocating to the Kurdistan region of Iraq seven years ago. After building a solid foundation working with prominent advertising agencies, Saeed has spent the past two years as a freelancer, where he focuses on producing high-quality, creative content for a diverse global clientele.
A professional encounter between a model and a photographer evolves into a powerful visual meditation: a portrait session that transcends the image to become an intimate manifesto on self-acceptance and the crucial need to overcome society’s imposed aesthetic standards. Shakila offers a very strong and self-assured testimony of acceptance. The film is almost a celebratory portrait of her beauty and courage. How effective was Shakila’s self-affirmation in driving the film’s tone and defining your concept of “poetic realism”?
My first interaction with Shakila was for a photoshoot, but as we were discussing the details of the photoshoot and how we wanted to go about it, I was struck by her incredible confidence and I suggested that instead of just taking photos, we should make a short documentary, Shakila’s character and her confidence was the reason why we went from doing a photoshoot to an short film.
Your film challenges society that privileges certain aesthetic standards. Do you believe that a portrait so intensely focused on the beauty and uniqueness of a single individual is a more effective tool for combating social homogenisation than a more traditional or collective documentary approach?
When you focus on an individual, the story becomes relatable rather than clinical and informative. If we talked about it in a form of a traditional documentary, it would have felt like a report designed to create a feeling of pity. But I didn’t want to target empathy, I wanted to portray beauty and Shakila’s confidence. My aim wasn’t to fight social homogenization or to create an influence, I simply wanted to tell the story of a beautiful Kurdish woman who has fully accepted her own uniqueness.
Despite the strong emotional content, the film uses simple tools, focusing on Shakila’s beautiful presence interspersed with her powerful spoken word. Did you intentionally keep the visual language almost “understated” to give maximum power to the protagonist’s voice and message?
I wanna start of answering this question by saying that this shoot was shakilas first time on camera where she narrates her own story. Because of this I decided to simplify the process of the documentary making and the tools I used in the process so she doesn’t get intimidated and give her more freedom, power and comfort to speak her mind and be herself on camera.
I used a small camera and the least amount of lighting and I recorded her voice using her own phone as shown in the documentary.At times limiting myself this way resulted in me being more creative and least distracted. I used these limitation as a challenge for myself cuz in the process of filmmaking you don’t need to have a lot of equipment to portray beauty and that really helped me stop chasing perfection and enjoy the process of making a documentary with the least amount of equipments possible.
Your choice to explicitly juxtapose Shakila’s vitiligo patches with natural elements, like clouds, is a very clear visual device. What was your goal in making the metaphor so direct? Were you aiming for an immediate emotional impact that bypassed the need for viewer interpretation?
Placing an image of Shakila’s skin next to an image of natural elements was a conscious choice. With these two images side by side, I didn’t want to show a comparison between them, as both are part of the same order that is seen in nature. I deliberately chose this metaphor directly, which is seen at the beginning of the short film, so that the audience doesn’t have to decipher anything. I wanted to create an immediate emotional impact. I wanted the audience to see without any intermediary that what society defines as “difference” can be as natural and beautiful as clouds in the sky.
