Revolutionary Memories of Bahman who loved Leila (2012)
★★½ — Revolutionary Memories of Bahman who loved Leila (2012)
Set against the turbulent backdrop of Tehran in 1978, Revolutionary Memories of Bahman who loved Leila is a short animated film from director Farahnaz Sharifi, running to just fifteen minutes. The film follows Bahman, a young man who falls for Leila, the sister of a friend killed in the revolutionary upheaval, weaving together personal longing and political unrest in a way that feels very much of its moment. Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution is rich territory for storytelling, a period when ordinary lives were caught up in extraordinary and often violent events, and the short film format has long proven a natural home for that kind of compressed, emotionally direct storytelling. Classified here under Iraq for cataloguing purposes, the film sits within a broader tradition of Middle Eastern animation that tends to favour handcrafted, painterly aesthetics over the polished but unremarkable look of mainstream studio work.
Sharifi is perhaps better known as a documentary filmmaker, and there is something of that observational instinct in the way this film is constructed, even within its animated form. The choice of animation is not merely stylistic: it allows the film to render memory, loss, and revolution in a register that live action might struggle to match, where the personal and the political bleed into one another almost as illustrations in a shared story. Short films of this type rarely get wide theatrical releases or significant festival profiles outside specialist circuits, which makes them easy to overlook, though that obscurity is often undeserved. If you have been following along with coverage of Iraqi and regional cinema here, you might also want to read the reviews of Europa and 16/03, two other films from the same country covered as part of the same world movie project.
Because the cast details for this production are not widely documented, it would be doing the film a disservice to speculate, but the voice performances and narration are central to how the story lands, carrying much of its emotional weight across those fifteen minutes. Animation of this scale is typically a small, close-knit affair, with the director's sensibility stamped firmly on every frame, and Revolutionary Memories has the feel of something made with real personal investment rather than as a commissioned piece. It sits alongside other short works from the early 2010s, a period that produced some quietly interesting animated and documentary shorts on the festival circuit, many of them now only discoverable through dedicated searching.
A-Z World Movie Tour Iraq I originally watched 16/03 but it was so catastrophically bad I decided I better watch another film. This short film was what I chose. Perfect length for the story. Loved the art style and narration. Love the animation. Overall a great love story from the perspective of a dead revolutionary.
I should be upfront that this one came to me via a slightly unusual route, picked as a replacement after the experience with 16/03 left me needing something that actually held together. It is funny how that works sometimes: a bad film sends you down a path you would not otherwise have taken, and you end up somewhere genuinely worthwhile. Fifteen minutes turned out to be exactly the right amount of time for this particular story, and I found myself thinking about it a good while after it ended, which is more than you can say for a lot of films three times the length. Some short films feel like they are simply waiting to become something longer, but this one did not need to be. It knew what it was.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2025-06-30
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: DocAlliance Films
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: DocAlliance Films
Rent: DocAlliance Films
Buy: DocAlliance Films
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Iraq: Europa (2021) · 16/03 (2017)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
