Subtotals

MAJMOUAN

Poland, Germany, Iran, 2022, 15'

Is it possible to quantify the quality of our existence? What is our being in the world made of? Of how many houses, beaches, mountains, families; of how many beds, dogs, siblings, or sunsets are we composed? How many loves, how many betrayals? Of how many dreams, how many regrets? How much does the unsaid say about us? In which habits do we recognize ourselves and are we recognized, beyond those that encode us on the outside and the most secret of our intimacy? Behind which appearances are we what we are? Where is our deepest self revealed?

Mohammadreza Farzad’s dazzling short concentrates the time lapse that separates the instant of our birth from the nearing of our end into a minimal duration, coagulating thoughts and numbers into a text written by the director himself where he discusses how the soul becomes flesh and how daily life has a transcendent quality. Resorting to minute fragments from home movies, the director embroiders a heart-rending reflection on the ephemeral persistence of images in which the eternal present of our lives is dissolved. And the sum of what we are would be incomplete without the amount of what we have never been and we have never managed to be.