Muted colour palettes, silent subject focus, and angled, alienating architecture -- I thought this would be a good week to highlight the work of Iranian designer, VFX artist, director and occasional didgeridoo player, Midia Kiasat.
Below are three of his exemplary poster designs for short films made in Iran.
The first, Witness, has a girl forlornly looking rom a mall (airport?) walkway/gantry out into empty space. Gradients of grey with clean, skinny type-facing and a credit block featuring light and dark text. Clearly the intent was not to portray this as 'feel good' cinema, but the slate palette is stark and effective.
I have a fondness for 'upside down' posters. The string lights in the shape of how a child will often draw a house, or should I say, a home, is immediately evocative. The play-time detritus scattered around the couching child is that of a model train set, and a smiling head of Dr. Frankenstein's Monster; all of this done in a hand-painted poster aesthetic.
Similar two-tone credit block at the bottom, but I love the graphical element of the title, تف, in Farsi.
The third design is eye-catching for the interior angle-line of a domestic space, and the perpendicular credit block up in the top of the poster.
A man and a woman in the same space, almost looking at one another, but in different rooms in this house. It's hazy, hand-drawn, and the walls, or background, have a texture to the olive and brown colours. To accent the angles, Kiasat has put the handrail of a stairwell into the foreground, at the bottom left. This also highlights the eyelines of the two people.
This is the only design of the three to feature a 'tagline, I Mess Around With You To Avoid Silence" and it is both wryly funny, and imminently sad. It is also placed above the man and woman (and doorframe) as it it were one of those plaques in some households, "Live. Laugh. Love." To a Western eye, this further adds to the irony.