Every year Open City Documentary Festival commissions a filmmaker previously screened at the festival to create the trailer for the following edition.

Filmmaker Niki Kohandel has screened …–Then Love is the Name (2022), Minevissam (I am Writing, 2023) and co-facilitated the workshop Cross-(R)evolutionary Sound Archives with Only Voice Remains (2023) in past editions of the festival. She spoke with Open City’s Marketing Manager Laverne Caprice to discuss the inspirations, context, and process for the 2025 trailer ‘A departure’.

Laverne Caprice: What inspired the central question of the film, how to navigate disappearing bodies of water?

Niki Kohandel: It’s always been a question for me personally, especially growing up in this time and age. It was my visit to Morocco last year that really brought this forward for me.

I visited an oasis called Tighmert and began learning about what they’ve been doing due to there being banana plantations, just next to the village in the desert. It’s impacted the lives of the people that live there significantly. It really connected with me and this question of ecological and mass scale grief that we’re living through at the moment.

I was also thinking about my father’s hometown, Isfahan, which has a river, the Zayandeh Rud, that is now completely dry. It helped me come up with the symbol of boats, and more specifically paper boats for the last two years as a way of dealing with grief. Things started to slowly connect like rivers that run parallel and at some point merge into the sea.

LC: Viewers are invited to build a paper boat. Alongside grief, what else do the paper boats symbolise for you in the context of this film?

NK: A year or so after I started to make these paper boats, a friend of mine shared a poem with me called Beyond the Seas by the Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri. He’s saying “I must build a boat”, and I read this as a collective invitation.

In the poem, the boat is a symbol, it’s meant to be this vessel that helps you process things and arrive at a place that’s brighter, a sort of utopia. For me specifically that place is going back to childhood and the way we question things as children.

LC: We do get that sense of childlike wonder, yet the narration is still quite adult. Was it the poem that made you decide on this for the film?

NK: Well, not specifically just the poem, but also my friend GolCHER who acts in the film – we’ve been dreaming a lot. We’ve been involved in protests where we’ve asked for things to be different and one day she asked me what is the point of a boat when there’s no water? She’s also from Isfahan so we were again thinking about the Zayandeh Rud and how things can just disappear in front of our eyes. We came to the solution that maybe the boat doesn’t sail, maybe it flies. Perhaps this is how we can reimagine things as tools are being taken away from us and everything is being stolen. You have to just constantly re-shift.

LC: On a more practical level, the boat featured in the piece is extremely large! Did you face any challenges in its creation? Were there times when you thought it may not work?

NK: All the time, I thought to myself why did I tell the Open City team that I wanted to make such a big boat! I’m glad I told you though; it held me accountable. To actually make the boat I enlisted the help of my friend Daniel Owusu and Frea Lei who are both artists and architecture students. We spent two days together figuring it all out. The first day consisted of trying to make models and prototypes, and the second day we actually made the boats. The act of making really encapsulates what the film is about because it was an act of faith and imagining something that feels unreachable but then actually doing it.

When we imagine things, that’s the first step and then we have the actual doing. There’s an invitation to make the boat, but it is up to people to decide where it is going and to make that happen. Making a paper boat is a small act but whatever brings people hope at this time is worth it.

LC:  How does the sound design reflect themes of disappearance, neocolonialism and resistance?

NK: I have to credit the sound designer and composer of the film’s score Bint Mbareh whom I first worked with last year through a live iteration of Only Voice Remains. Our first sound piece was composed of voice notes and songs as well as different chants for freedom coming from Iran, Kurdistan and its diaspora. For the second iteration (that was also showcased at Open City in 2023), we included voices from other movements that connect and intersect. We were invited by Selene’s Archives to present it and worked on a live piece with Bint Mbareh, so we were able to add new things to it. It was natural for us to collaborate and work together again, especially as she [Bint Mbareh] is a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine.

The sound in this film was made of different recordings, some that Bint Mbareh had and some that we created together, with me singing. It has become a source of processing grief and it’s something that people do individually or collectively.

LC: What else can viewers take away from “A departure” – is there a specific call to action? I guess making a boat is a good start…

NK: Yes, making a boat is a good start and perhaps giving it to someone else.  Mostly, I think it’s about people starting to organise. Films can only be calls to do something else. I don’t think that film in itself is a real action, it’s more of a gesture, a signal. “A departure” is only a start, it’s nothing more than that.

LC: What’s next for you? Are you working on anything else?

NK: Quite big things hopefully! I’d like the big boat to appear in something else again, a longer piece of work. I’m mostly focusing on facilitation projects at the moment. I’m also going to try to not make any more short films, this way I can actually take my time and bring things together in something where we can find the boat again…

Short films are like sprints, one after the other and I think it’s time to run a marathon!

Niki Kohandel’s practice sits in the space between recording and rewriting a story. She works in collaboration with family members, friends and young people, playing with languages, analogue film, childhood memories and colours.

She is currently a Cubitt artist in residence at the Arts and Media School Islington, where she shares her story-telling practice with students through workshops, talks and paper boat making.

You can watch the full trailer here.