Description:

Song Sparrow is about immigration. People of different color and race and culture, old and young, embark on journeys, eager to find some place they can call home, or just some place they can live in. Many brave perils more formidable than the ones they ran for in the first place. It is not always weathering storms till and onto shores of calm and prosperity; many a time storms keep them company on and off shores. They dream of better lives while in reality having little choice. It is about a real event which happened in Austria in August 2015, where flesh and bone of human and animal become intermingled. This short movie may inspire the viewer to ask: "is it better to go or stay", or more accurately: "is it worse to stay than to go? Is a large chunk of humanity entrapped by events befallen their lands many centuries before they were even born? Song Sparrow uses dolls to pose these questions. It is no less disturbing even though dolls have no life in them. But an attempt is made to show the situation faced by those that have no choice but to put their lives in peril to escape perils of staying, and to trade staying within chaos for a chaotic escape.

Biography:

Farzaneh Omidvarnia was born in Iran, Graduated from University of Tehran, and faculty of Fine Arts. She received a PhD in Design in 2015 from Technical University of Denmark. Following her graduation, she began to focus on creation of fabric sculptures and writing short stories. Her artworks soon appeared in several art exhibition in Europe and Iran, and she published her first collection of short stories in 2016. In 2017, she directed and produced her first animated film “To Be” (6 minutes, drama). The movie was acclaimed internationally and won prizes in different festivals.