As I Lay Dying

A sea of bodies movesmove through Tehran, alive with hope, fear, and gathering defiance, before dissolving into silence. Filmmakers Mohammadreza Farzad and Pegah Ahangarani, reconstruct the Green Movement that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran, through raw, handheld footage. The images are unstable and immediate; chants rising, gunshots cracking, crowds breaking through dark corridors and gathering on candlelit rooftops. A calm voice-over cuts through the noise, pausing on blurred figures to trace the lives that followed. These constructed personas, grounded in real experiences, speak of exile, disappearance, separation, and survival—lives shaped in the aftershock of collective resistance. Friends vanish into rooms they never return from; lovers are divided by a revolution; conversations remain unfinished. Blending documentary and poetic storytelling, As I Lay Dying becomes an inquiry into what remains after a movement fades: not resolution, but scattered lives, fragile recollections, and the unsettling sense that history is always partially lost, even as it is being recorded.