Andrius Arutiunian

Roya, an Iranian teacher imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin Prison for her political beliefs, is faced with a choice: make a forced televised confession or remain confined to her three-square-metre cell. As past and present slip out of sequence and exchange places, she moves between inner landscapes and lived experience.

According to the 12th century mystic Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, the world we live in is only one of the 18,000 that make up the universe. The film 18,000 WORLDS is conceived as a video story that draws attention to a world that is losing contact with its ancestors, and where the danger of losing forms of knowledge is real.

A slow, continuous zoom focuses on the Armenian mountains above an ancient riverbed, while the voices of two demons echo off-screen. Inspired by Michael Snow’s Wavelength, a hallucinatory meditation on disappearance.