As I Lay Dying

“There were so many of us, but when it all ended, each of us went our own way.” We see footage of the Green Movement, a wave of protests in Iran that began in the summer of 2009, in response to the presidential election fraud in favor of the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We see the chaos, the solidarity among the people, and the amazement too: that this is possible, that this is actually happening. Shaky handheld images capture both the energy of the crowd and the panic when shots suddenly ring out. Meanwhile, a voice-over calmly recounts what happened to the people we see.

Each time, the wild images are paused for a moment and we hear what became of the person we see in the blurry images. These stories are fictional in the sense that they don’t correspond to the actual people we’re looking at, or to the names they’re given here, although they are drawn directly from life. No matter how heartbreaking these stories are, the narrator maintains the same calm distance, as if observing it all from a different dimension.