Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
Festival Nominations
Dance Film Making 2024 - Official Selection
MOV’IN Cannes 2023 - Finalist (Cannes, France)
Multiplié Dance Film 2024 - Official Selection (Trondheim, Norway)
Dança em foco 2023 - Official Selection (Rio De Janero, Brazil)
NeosFest 2023 - Honourable Mention (Monterey, Mexico)
Lift-Off Global Network 2023/First Time Filmmaker Sessions - Official selection (Iver, UK)
Cast
Choreographer, Dancer, Director, Videographer: Ghazal Ramzani
Music composition and performance: Ella Bergström
Dramatic adviser: Niusha Ramzani
Outside eye: Anika Barkan
Post-production Sound: Paul Bäcklin and Johan Weber
Ghazal Ramzani's debut dance film, "Self-Portrait and Other Ruins," is a poetic tribute to her foremothers' legacy of resistance. Directed, choreographed, danced, and produced by Ramzani, the film traces the artist’s emotional odyssey against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic in Qaemshahr, Iran. Triggered by her grandmother's passing in the pandemic, Ramzani’s return home after years of exile unveils memories of loss. At the heart of this dance film lies the notion of self as a collective entity, fragmented by repeated traumas of displacement and separation. In her childhood home, the dancer's body becomes a site of remembrance, revealing not just her story but echoes of countless lives etched within the walls. The medium of film allows the movements to unfold in the solitude of the modest house, which, for Ghazal Ramzani, is a place of intimacy, observation, emotion, and dance – the very bedrock of her artistic expression. Contemplating the collective self, fractured by loss, united in resistance, the artist reshapes the ruins of the past into a fragmented self-portrait – a kinetic archive of female working-class history, a site of remembrance as well as resistance where love and laughter open up a path to healing.
Artist Statement
“Self-Portrait and Other Ruins” was developed in a 10 months process during the Covid 19 pandemic in my hometown of Qaemshahr-Mazandaran/Iran. My grandmother’s death as a result of the virus opened up old wounds that exile had inflicted on my body. She was my earth and my homeland. In her empty house, memories of a lost paradise that still is my deepest longing, began to move my body. Carried by an always present past, I started dancing, in every room, in the yard, through memories. I danced with long-departed bodies. With my eyes closed I became my mother’s rebellion, my grandmother’s smile, my great-grandmother’s lullaby. I became the growing ancestral tree. In “Self-Portrait and Other Ruins,” I pay tribute to my female ancestors and to their legacy of pain, love and resistance.”
Dancefilmmaking Jury statement
“We could feel the pain and emotional rehabilitation through the screen. The death of a matriarch always yields ripples of grief.”
