Grandad was a romantic

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.