Deyzangeroo
2017 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Ehsan Gharib
Genres: animation, documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
The Deyzangeroo ritual of Bushehr, Iran, shaped by colonial rule and African slaves, is performed to ward off evil spirits and reclaim the moon during a lunar eclipse.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people see a documentary about a Persian ritual and file it away; Gharib takes the form and splinters it into animation and myth, making something that resists every category at once—which means it's probably doing something worth paying attention to.
This sits in direct conversation with the ethnographic documentary tradition while interrogating it through animation and surrealism; the formal choice to animate a living ritual stakes a real claim about how we know and represent cultural memory.
The decision to animate rather than observe—to make the Deyzangeroo visible through hand-drawn abstraction instead of the camera's eye—is the entire film, and it's what allows four minutes to contain centuries of colonial history and spiritual resistance without a single word of exposition.