FLATLAND
Kurzfilm( 14:34 min) by Alireza Keymanesh

(2017) is a multi-award-winning experimental dance film co-directed by Alireza Keymanesh and Amir Pousti, produced by 33Projects, with a score composed by Peter Pirhosseinloo and featuring a hundred female dancers. Inspired by the eponymous 1884 novel by Edwin A. Abbott, the film delves into various dimensions of the universe and humanity’s incapability to perceive beyond the limits of its perception, exploring such fundamental concepts as birth and collective living.
Poetically bringing geometric shapes to life through dance, FLATLAND is a 14-minute, one-shot, drone-captured, bird’s-eye view of a rooftop in Tehran. The dancers fade away, transforming into a multitude of atomized bodies melting into the urban environment, blurring the boundaries between the human body and its surroundings. This minimalistic dance film is designed to be projected on large screens, on walls around the city as well as in cinema theaters and galleries, offering an immersive and captivating experience for the audience.

My lovely home
Kurzfilm (13:48 min) by Alireza Keymanesh

An exhausted human being, striving to find a home, heads toward nowhere.
The film is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s essay “The Exhausted.”
Do humans truly own the home they live in? What and where is “home”? Does s/he own any
place at all or is s/he essentially usurpers? What is humankind struggling for?
Each human being has his/her own burden, weighing her down: “his inner conflict with being,”
“the pressure of her past life,” “his emotional complex,” “the historical trauma of humankind” and
so on. The burden has exhausted humankind, but s/he is still moving. This exhausted existence
is still brave enough to move, toward it, the human is moving, despite his exhaustion, striving to
find a home, heads nowhere.

BIO
Alireza Keymanesh

Born in Iran, Alireza Keymanesh is an international artist adventuring in the ocean of art as a filmmaker, actor, and choreographer. Alireza earned his BA in acting from Tehran University of Arts in 2009 before carrying out a year-long practical dance theater research at ArtEZ University of Arts in the Netherlands in 2013. Currently he is in the second year of his MFA in Film at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he has been focusing on interweaving some aspects of
experimental art, dance, and theater into narrative cinema. Alireza’s work has been screened at various festivals around the world and he has received several awards both as a filmmaker and actor. In addition to that, he introduced and developed the Ideokinesis method (one of the oldest body-mind techniques in the Western world) in Iran by holding numerous workshops, and lectures and translating the Ideokinesis book written by André Bernard, Wolfgang Steinmuller, and Ursula Stricker.

Image credits: Alireza Keymanesh