Behdad Esfahbod Short Films

Identity, memory, breakdown, and recovery.

I started making films as a way to heal and to share experiences I was still trying to understand.

My films have screened from Canada to Nepal. For festival selections and awards and screenings, see the résumé page.

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∞ Identity

Identity is a short autobiographical piece about gender fluidity, memory, and transformation. Read the text.

∞ Eternal Presence: Journey into the Mind

The film follows a girl born during Iran's 1979 revolution. She grows up amid war and global upheaval, experiences a breakdown, and begins to heal through self-care.

∞ Statement

In January 2020, during a visit to Iran, I was detained and psychologically tortured by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), then released on the condition that I spy for them. I disclosed what had happened six months later, but the trauma contributed to a severe mental breakdown. I turned to art as a way to heal. Filmed at home on a phone during recurring COVID-19 quarantines, Eternal Presence emerged from that process.

The film ends with the IRGC's downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752. Her story becomes part of a trauma shared by a generation.

Nudity—prohibited in Iranian cinema—became both an act of defiance and an image of individual loneliness. I used film grain to make anxiety visible.

∞ Mother and Child

Asal Andarzipour plays both the mother and the child. The mother's unplanned pregnancy unfolds in a red room that suggests a womb, already filled with the anxiety of revolution. After the birth, Andarzipour plays the child as she grows up through the Iran-Iraq War and later upheavals, breaks down after the downing of Flight PS752, and begins to recover.

My own struggle with gender identity during production influenced the decision to cast a woman in both roles.

∞ Water

Water has no conventional plot. It is a visual and musical piece built from landscape, movement, and ambient sound. A solitary observer moves upstream against the current; when he can go no farther, he returns to shore and watches the water pass.

The sound of water was recorded on Qeshm Island, Iran; the images were filmed at Abraham Lake and Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada.

∞ MANIA

In 2020 and 2021, I experienced severe bipolar mania. MANIA is a short autobiographical piece reflecting on that episode and the difficult journey back. Read the text.