Mahda Purmehdi
Directing
Biography
Mahda Purmehdi (b. 1994, Tehran, Iran) is an experimental filmmaker and educator. He works across the mediums of 16mm, Super 8 and digital video, often integrating original images, words, and sounds with reconfigured literary and audio-visual material. At the heart of his filmmaking practice are questions of modes of film production and the political implications of image-making. His films are characterized as visually tactile and handmade evocations, colliding archive and memory, visible and invisible, the living and ghosts, history (especially film history) and the forgotten.
Known For
Images of the landscape and the road start to melt and peel off on a drive from one city to another.
It Will Come Back One Way or Another
Shot on a Bolex set on a tripod. Each shot with the duration that the fully rewound motor of the Bolex runs. Then comes in a gust of wind.
Ancraophobia
An enigmatic glimpse of life through precarious vignettes, propelling a narrative through a nebulous and opaque structure that sutures the filmmaker's home movie footage to archival material—from Hollywood narrative films to political selfie videos. A handmade impression of a time suspended between past and present and the ghosts and places occupying it, contemplating the nature and meaning of vision, memory and image making.
Eautopsie
Birds looking anxiously at a threat beyond the frame, and then the threat arrives. Mixing a found footage educational film with sci-fi and horror traditions and hand-painted manipulation of the film stock, a familiar narrative is inverted, recontextualizing the fear of others through the anthropocentric eye.
The Blob
A sketch artist finds himself in a nightmarish situation when he is visited by three mysterious men who want to inspect him.
Vision
An excavational inquiry through photographs, touch, and looking at times and places far from here and now, animating and conjuring a link between past and present.
Noli me tangere
A found 16mm print of a short narrative film set in the American Civil War, along with Super 8 home movies of the filmmaker’s family in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, are fused into a ghostly labyrinth. Made entirely on a JK Optical Printer, the film exhumes gestures, movements, conflicts, and forces in constant resurgence.
For If Night Leaves Something Undone, the Day Undertakes to Complete It
A man travels through space and time to fulfill the gruesome desires of figures residing in an unworldly dimension.