The British-Iranian animator Maryam Mohajer’s films are often populated by characters inspired by her childhood in Tehran as rendered in her unique, deeply expressive visual style. Evoking a children’s book that’s been summoned to motion, her BAFTA-award winning short film Grandad Was a Romantic features a young girl recalling how her grandfather – an exceptional athlete and irrepressible charmer – fell in love with her grandmother’s picture, travelled great distances to seek her hand in marriage and eventually started a family with her. But, as the short’s acerbic finale reveals, the storybook romance didn’t quite culminate in a happy-ever-after ending. Offering a clever corrective to the trope of the idealised family love story from generations past, Mohajer’s piece seems to suggest that intense romantic gestures should be met with a healthy degree of scepticism, as should stories suggesting that relationships were somehow simpler and more innocent way back when.
No flock of sheep nor arranged marriage will temper Asho’s Hollywood dreams
Directed by Jafar Najafi
