Celebrating Nowruz with NFB short film about woman immigrating from Iran to Canada

The National Film Board of Canada is highlighting the Persian New Year, known as Nowruz, by putting a spotlight on Persian Canadian filmmakers.

The NFB is streaming “Two Apples,” a stop-motion animated short film about a young woman who immigrates from Iran to Canada.

The film board is hoping to leave viewers with a modern perspective of an ancient world.

“Of course, we’re the National Film Board of Canada, but we don’t want to make films only about Canada. We want to go abroad and make films on other realities,” said Marc St-Pierre, a film curator at the NFB.

“We wanted to include films from Iran, but also from Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Because we have to remember that in ancient times, at a certain point, the Persian Empire was really, really large. It extended from Egypt to Afghanistan.”

Created by Bahram Javahery, “Two Apples” uses a unique form of carved relief stop-motion that requires working with slabs of clay, as a story of cultural exchange and peace unfolds. It’s one of many films the board is offering as part of a free curated playlist titled “Perspectives from the Persian World and Central Asia.”

“The films that we have are kind of pretty recent films,” St-Pierre said. “I mean, they’re not about the Persian Empire back in those old days. That’s why we wanted to put in front some film… with kind of modern perspectives.”

In the nine-minute short, the young woman leaves her home looking for a better future. And with her, she brings a “ripe apple studded with fragrant cloves” – a memory from her past life.

Montrealers took the time Tuesday to reflect on both the movie and the New Year itself, a nearly 4,000-year-old tradition known as the Festival of Fire that’s linked to the Zoroastrian religion.

“Telling the story of a woman immigrating to Canada, I think that’s quite significant because with all the challenges that women are facing in Iran, Canada for them is more where they can be truly themselves, where they can be whatever they want to be without having any barriers,” Leila told CityNews.

“Persian New Year for me is always a new beginning,” she added. “It’s like having a sense of being home while being away from home.”

St-Pierre feels the movie, which was part of the official selection of several film festivals last year, is a representation of the true Canadian experience.

“Canada is really a mix of cultures right now,” he said. “So people come through immigration from different countries. And they bring their background, their culture.

“We also want to be representative of all this beautiful diversity that we have in Canada all over the country.”

The National Film Board of Canada is encouraging everybody to explore their movie playlist at nfb.ca.