Alireza Keymanesh, Amir Pousti

Flatland

15 min

#film

Iran

Flatland is an experimental dance film that translates the geometric world of Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella of the same name into movement. Abbott’s story imagines a two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric figures who are incapable of perceiving dimensions beyond the one in which they exist. When the square A Square encounters a three-dimensional sphere, he is confronted for the first time with the possibility of a world beyond the limits of his own perception.

The film transposes this idea into the urban landscape of Tehran. Shot from a high vantage point on the roof of a building, the camera gradually strips the dancers of their recognisable human scale, turning them into a multitude of tiny bodies or dots. Their movements merge into geometric patterns, disperse and reassemble, until the human body almost dissolves into the city surrounding it. Captured in a single continuous shot, the dance becomes a visual experiment in dimensions and the limits of human perception.

Flatland is at once minimalist and spectacular: the individual body disappears into the multitude, while the multitude becomes a collective choreography. Rather than retelling Abbott’s story literally, the film translates its central question into an image: what exists beyond what we are capable of seeing?

15 minutes of geometry, shapes and impossible dimensions.

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bio

Alireza Keymanesh is an Iranian filmmaker, actor and artist currently based in Toronto, Canada. His work draws on theatre, contemporary dance, poetry, psychology and dark comedy, often exploring the intersection of body and mind. He graduated in Acting from Tehran University of Arts in 2009, undertook a year of dance-theatre research at ArtEZ University of Arts in the Netherlands in 2013, and received an MFA in Film from York University in Canada in 2024.

As an actor, he was a member of the 84 Theater Group, led by Ali Akbar Alizad, for ten years, appearing in works by Samuel Beckett, Sławomir Mrożek, Jean Genet and David Mamet. He has received several awards for his acting, including the Second Actor of the Year Award at the 9th Iranian Theater Forum in 2011 and the Best Actor of the Year Award at the forum’s 14th annual ceremony for his performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 2017, he founded 33Projects, now known as 33Spaces, a decentralised space for artistic exploration, creativity and expression.

As a filmmaker, Keymanesh has received several international awards for Flatland (2017), co-directed with Amir Pousti. His film My Lovely Home received the Golden Filmmaking Award at the Greensboro Dance Film Festival in 2021. In recent years, he has increasingly focused on narrative cinema, combining intellectual exploration with physicality and emotional depth.

credits

Direction Alireza Keymanesh, Amir Pousti

Production 33Projects

Choreography Alireza Keymanesh

Camera Amir Pousti

Music Peter Pirhosseinloo

Assistant Kourosh Mohammadi

Dance and performance Kourosh Mohammadi, Saeed Taherkhani, Pedram Samadi, Sima Sadeghi, Hedieh Bakhtiari, Elham Iravani, Sanaz Eslami, Nasim Arian, Shuka Karimi and additional performers

Guest screening production En–Knap Productions

In collaboration with Moovy Tanzfilmfestival